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I’ve been developing a language for a few years, and even with incomplete semantics and a simple one page example LLMs don’t have much trouble writing it.

I think the language/syntax has an impact, but the tooling around it will be most important for LLMs, in the same way it is for humans.

by rapind7 hours ago|

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I used to hold this opinion but since changing to Rust on the server and Typescript on the client, I can confidently tell you agents are so much better at Rust, especially at producing idiomatic code, than they are at Gleam.

There are reasons to love Gleam and Lustre (I like Gleam a lot), but LLMs just aren't one of them. I made the switch to Rust around May this year. Also the community is super anti-AI, arguably with good reason (how it impacts open source), and I'd recommend keeping your AI code to yourself.

by maleldil10 hours ago|

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Gleam has been stable for over two years, so maybe it's been long enough that LLMs have internalised the documentation.

Given it's a language that doesn't really contain any groundbreaking ideas[1] (the closest is 'use' IMO), it's possible LLMs can reuse patterns from other functional language.

[1] This isn't criticism. I love how Gleam turned out.

by jdiff10 hours ago|

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That's not a take I was expecting to find here. I've found most LLMs absolutely dreadful when it comes to Gleam, to the point that I most often disable even inline autocomplete when working in Gleam codebases.

Too often I find them getting pulled into larger ruts in the training data and trying to insert language features that don't exist (ifs, loops, and syntactic constructs) from more popular languages like TypeScript and Rust. Do you not experience other languages getting partially substituted in when you have LLMs write Gleam?

by MichaelNolan10 hours ago|

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I suspect it depends a lot on the llm/harness being used. But when I use Opus/cc or sol/codex, at the end of the turn everything compiles, passes tests, and passes lint. I never even look at code that can't compile. Maybe the LLM is generating weird stuff in-between, but I don't see it.

What you're describing feels like my experience back in 2024/25. Back then I was using a llm auto complete or the chat interface, and I would get weird stuff all the time. (not just gleam but any language).

by grayrest7 hours ago|

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For an even more niche language, Roc basically became usable in the new syntax about two months ago (still has compiler crashes, there's a good reason it hasn't had a real release) but Opus writes it just fine after a couple corrections to handle the language's quirks.