[vzaliva]

A slow day in Go-news land? :)

It is heathwarming to see such mundane small tech bit making front page of HN when elsewhere is is debated whether programming as profession is dead or more broadly if AI will be enslaving humanity in the next decade. :)

[serial_dev]

It’s nice to have a break from AI FUD. It reminds me of a time when I could browse HN without getting anxiety immediately, because nowadays you can’t open a comment section without finding a comment about how you ngmi.

[JimDabell]

Well fortunately you’re here to take what was a discussion completely unrelated to AI and drag it back around to AI again.

If you’re tired of talking about AI, why did you post this?

[0x696C6961]

Man... I spent the last 6 months writing code using voice chat with multiple concurrent Claude code agents using an orchestration system because I felt like that was the new required skill set.

In the past few weeks I've started opening neovim again and just writing code. It's still 50/50 with a Claude code instance, but fuck I don't feel a big productivity difference.

[cwbriscoe]

I just write my own code and then ask AI to find any issues and correct them if I feel it is good advice. What AI is amazing at is writing most of my test cases. Saves me a lot of time.

[LtWorf]

I've seen tests doing:

a = 1

assert a == 1

// many lines here where a is never used

assert a == 1

Yes AI test cases are awesome until you read what it's doing.

[ownagefool]

To be fair, many human tests I've read do similar.

Especially when folks are trying to push % based test metrics and have types ( and thus they tests assert types where the types can't really be wrong ).

I use AI to write tests. Many of them the e2e fell into the pointless niche, but I was able to scope my API tests well enough to get very high hit rate.

The value of said API tests aren't unlimited. If I had to hand roll them, I'm not sure I would have written as many, but they test a multitude of 400, 401, 402, 403, and 404s, and the tests themselves have absolutely caught issues such as validator not mounting correctly, or the wrong error status code due to check ordering.

[alecbz]

It's good at writing/updating tedious test cases and fixtures when you're directing it more closely. But yes, it's not as great at coming up with what to test in the first place.

[gzread]

I write assert(a==1) right before the line where a is assumed to be 1 (to skip a division by a) even if I know it's 1. Especially if I know it's 1!

[zahlman]

The assertion here is not about implementation logic. GP presumably has in mind unit tests, specifically in a framework where the test logic is implemented with such assertions. (For the Python ecosystem, pytest is pretty much standard, and works that way.)

[porridgeraisin]

Yep. Especially for tests with mock data covering all sorts of extreme edge cases.

[koakuma-chan]

Don't use AI for that, it doesn't know what your real data looks like.

[porridgeraisin]

Majority of data in typical message-passing plumbing code are a combination of opaque IDs, nominal strings, few enums, and floats. It's mostly OK for these cases, I have found. Esp. in typed languages.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

lol. okay. neither do you.

[tossandthrow]

There has always been a difference on modality and substance.

This is the same thing as picking a new smart programming language or package, or insisting that Dvorak layout is the only real way forward.

Personally I try to put as much distance to the modality discussion and get intimate with the substance.

[p0w3n3d]

> voice chat ... required skill set

But we're still required to go to the office, and talking to a computer on the open space is highly unwelcome

[gzread]

Right. If AI actually made you more productive, there would be more good software around, and we wouldn't have the METR study showing it makes you 20% slower.

AI delivers the feeling of productivity and the ability to make endless PoCs. For some tasks it's actually good, of course, but writing high quality software by itself isn't one.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

Ah, yes. LLM-assisted development. That thing that is not at all changing, that thing that different people aren’t doing differently, and that thing that some people aren’t definitely way better at than others. I swear that some supposedly “smart” people on this website throw their ability to think critically out the window when they want to weigh in on the AI culture war. B-but the study!

I can way with certainty that: 1. LLM-assisted development has gotten significantly, materially better in the past 12 months.

2. I would be incredibly skeptical of any study that’s been designed, executed, analysed, written about, published, snd talked about here, within that period of time.

This is the equivalent of a news headline stating with “science says…”.

[xerox13ster]

Nobody is interested in your piece of anecdata and asserting that something has gotten better without doing any studies on it, is the exact opposite of critical thinking.

You are displaying the exact same thing that you were complaining about.

[stavros]

Really? The past two weeks I've been writing code with AI and feel a massive productivity difference, I ended up with 22k loc, which is probably around as many I'd have manually written for the featureset at hand, except it would have taken me months.

[0x696C6961]

My work involves fixing/adding stuff in legacy systems. Most of the solutions AI comes up with are horrible. I've reverted back to putting problems on my whiteboard and just letting it percolate. I still let AI write most of the code once I know what I want. But I've stopped delegating any decision making to it.

[stavros]

Ah, yeah, I can see that. It's not as good with legacy systems, I've found.

[richard_todd]

Well at least for what I do, success depends on having lots of unit tests to lean on, regardless of whether it is new or existing code. AI plus a hallucination-free feedback loop has been a huge productivity boost for me, personally. Plus it’s an incentive to make lots of good tests (which AI is also good at)

[MrBuddyCasino]

A lot of people‘s business model is to to capitalize on LLM anxiety to sell their PUA-tier courses.

[VLM]

Its a small tech bit but a big architecture / management decision.

Basically, who runs golang?

The perfectionists are correct, UUIDs are awful and if there's a pile of standards that all have small problems the best thing you can do is make a totally new standard to add to the already too long list.

The in-the-trenches system software devs want this BAD. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#... They want a library that flawlessly interops with everything on that list, ideally. Something you can trust and will not deprecate a function you need for live code and it just works. I admit a certain affinity to this perspective.

The cryptobros want to wait, there is some temporary current turmoil in UUID land. Not like "drama" but things are in flux and it would be horrible for golang to be stuck permanently supporting forever some interim thing that officially gets dropped (or worse, under scrutiny has a security hole or something, but for reverse compatibility with older/present golang would need permanent-ish reverse compatibility) Can't we just wait until 2027 or so? This is not the ideal time to set UUID policy in concrete. Just wait a couple more months or a year or two? https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9562

I think I covered the three groups that are fighting pretty accurately and at least semi fairly, I did make fun of the perfectionists a little but cut me a break everyone makes fun of those guys.

So, yeah, a "small technical bit" but its actually a super huge architectural / leadership / management decision.

I hope they get it correct, I love golang and have a side thing with tinygo. If you're doing something with microcontrollers that doesn't use networking and you're not locked in to a framework/rtos, just use tinygo its SO cool. Its just fun. I with tinygo had any or decent networking. Why would I need zephyr if I have go routines? Hmm.

I've been around the block a few times with UUID-alike situations and the worst thing they could decide is to swing to an extreme. They'll probably be OK this is not golangs first time around the block either.

It'll probably be OK. I hope.

[sourcegrift]

I'm seeing deep technical stuff after months, so I'm happy!

[YesThatTom2]

Here we see Go haters in their natural habitat, the HN comment section.

Watch as they stand at the watering hole, bored and listless. A sad look on their faces, knowing that now that Go has generics, all their joy has left their life. Like the dog that caught his tail, they are confused.

One looks at his friends as if to say, "Now what?"

Suddenly there is a noise.

All heads turn as they see the HN post about UUIDs.

One of the members pounces on it. "Why debate this when the entire industry is collapsing?"

No reply. Silence.

His peers give a half-hearted smile, as if to say, "Thanks for trying" but the truth is apparent. The joy of hating on programming languages is nil when AI is the only thing looking at code any more.

The Go hater returns to the waterhole. Defeated.

[nightfly]

I think you're massively misreading the tone of the comment you're relying to