[Urahandystar]

Makes alot of sense and token cost reduction is obviously going to be a factor in the future of development, Something sets of my spidey sense though. Is Wasp mature enough for an LLM to understand how it functions when you go off the beaten path and try coming up with novel solutions?

[verdverm]

Wasp has been trying to convince people to use their DSL for a long time. It's from the low/no-code era. I've never seen it anywhere besides their developer marketing on HN.

Custom DSLs that Ai's don't know about are a bad idea, and also generally for many reasons because they are hard to get right. You are going to have to feed the context in on how to use them for every message. Wasp may be ok here, as they predate the inflection point. They still have a knowledge gap / usage issue. No one really uses or wants the DSL, so there are few humans who can be in the loop to make sure it works as intended.

[Martinsos]

Martin from Wasp here -> you are right that we kind of went overly into DSL, we are actually switching it to TS at the moment (experimental version already out for some time but now making it the main way to use Wasp), but not because of the AI, instead because we found it was too hard to maintain and develop. We thought custom ergonomics of it will be worth it, but turned out we didn't get much on that side, while we lost a lot by not using existing ecosystem of well known language.

Btw, AI actually works great for it. I am sure part is that the Wasp's DSL exists for some time now, but it actually worked well for the very start, because the DSL was quite simple (similar to JSON) and AI knows how to generalize very well.

So I wouldn't discourage people from writing DSLs because of AI -> AI can understand them very well -> but for the reasons of missing out on all of the benefits of using a strong host language and doing it as an embedded DSL in it. If you are doing your own, completely standalone DSL, you will need to implement a compiler, editor extensions, LSP, maybe module system if you need it, maybe package system/manager if you need it, ... . Although when I think about it, that is also easier now with AI, than it was before! Hm yeah actually maybe custom DSLs are a good idea these days, with AI doing most of the job for you. I still wouldn't go back to custom DSL for Wasp however because biggest thing for us is probably familiarity -> custom DSL just scares people off.

[verdverm]

This resonates with my experience building app DSLs. I've moved to CUE instead of a general purpose PL, to remain in the declarative space.

The fundamental issue that remains is abstraction. Low/no code is not what developers want. The rationale you use for Ai and your product is the same one developers use for not choosing products like yours. It takes developers too far from how things actually work. That pain manifests more after development time. So while you can show some nice stats for the basics, they ROI doesn't manifest in the long run. Hiring is also a pain for anything so little used, network effect and all that. Wasp has been around a long time, yet never taken off. This is something we consider when looking for broad tech stack changes that something like Wasp requires.