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by dnautics 17 days ago
> I can't imagine using a language without a good type system

have you tried?

i use elixir and carefully watch the agents and its very seldom making typing mistakes (elixir is in-between, it's typed but only as a checker).

ultimately typing doesn't help as much because it's nonlocal information. if the system can locally infer what the shape of functions is, it's way better.

1 comments

"i use elixir and carefully watch"

- I do not watch agents, at all. Rust and Typescript. When I use Typescript only I have some guidelines so that we build the stack to be as strict and type driven as possible.

Similar for me, I don’t want to babysit agents . I’m sticking with Python for the libraries (data science ecosystem), but I find that imposing ty and a few reasonable ruff rules (imposed with pre-commit so the agent can fix things automatically) improves agent-generated code a lot.
architecture matters more. at least for now, you should watch (not babysit) your agent, because it will slop up your architecture while you're not looking.
I'm watching because I'm particular about architecture. current project (company runs on it, its jira-lite + obsidian + benchling + a lab notebook, mendeley + a lims + a hardware kiosk that uploads scientific measurements directly to the notebook, everything running on cqrs and quill delta for operational transforms) is like ~100k loc and most new features are trivial (i just added a pcr wizard) because claude knows what particular patterns i use (and they are deliberately chosen to be more straightforward that conventional elixir/phoenix), but i do catch claude trying to do something chaotic from time to time. i suspect sometimes anthropic is routing me to a dumber model, because i can sense it happening, and if i keep going, it will make things really bad from an organizational standpoint, abd i have to roll back, but if i go to bed and pick it up next morning its fine.

next features are integrating a small transformer i built to codon optimize and probably "slack" to better communicate with the 2 ppl who work for me.

is your rust+typescript project at that level of complexity?