The latest models are capable of non-slop code and tolerable prose (OpenAI is much better than Anthropic on the prose but I think Anthropic has a slight edge on code quality). It’s really just pre-Astra models that are super sloppy. Annoyingly you get what you pay for.

Also the benchmarks don’t really seem to capture this at all. I guess it is difficult to have a benchmark for code quality or writing style.

Ooo interesting, I didn’t know that!

Rust is pretty great in almost all domains. The only ones where I think Python is a sensible choice are research, where a REPL is really useful (think Jupyter).

There are plenty of things that are “scripting”, i.e. ad-hoc admin of other projects that aren’t actually Python projects, where you want to share code between multiple scripts.

Rust has scripting support. It’s nightly only but that’s not actually a big deal since running nightly is trivial.

It has some limitations currently, but… so does Python.

Just because import works different in the language than the ones you like, does not mean the language is crap.

No, it means it’s unsuitable for scripting, if you need anything more than a single file. Better than Bash of course (not hard).

Why bother with the significant pain of FFI when you can just write the whole thing in Rust?

Also “the critical parts” is mostly a myth. After a small amount of optimisation, the vast majority of programs do not have nice isolated hotspots.

Python may be a grown up language but it’s still a pretty awful language for ad-hoc scripting. It really wants to believe that you only use it for writing Python projects damnit! You can beat it into submission, but as soon as you start typing import in a situation that isn’t a nice pure Python package it will say “whatchulookinatmate? Youwannafight?”

Don’t believe me? Explain how relative imports work.

Assuming that’s a genuine question…

AI needs feedback just the same as humans. I would think of AI like a human that’s of average cleverness, but has a huge breadth of knowledge and basically infinite time and patience. They are going to be decent at assembly but they’re still going to make mistakes just like humans.

Using a language like Rust that has a lot of static correctness checks gives a higher quality result for AI, just like it does for humans.

Yeah anyway with AI why would you use Python for a new project? I just do everything in Rust now, including simple scripts.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of existing Python code.

None of those have been successful for various reasons (I think primarily because they all sound like they’d be a total nightmare to set up and maintain).

As soon as uv provides an alternative implementation so you can just run uv run --but-fast I think it will become popular.

I would not be at all surprised if they are secretly working on a faster Python implementation. They own all of the non-shit Python tooling, they have unlimited tokens now, they aren’t afraid of vibe coding. Why not?

I am eagerly waiting for someone to vibe code a version of Python that isn’t shit. Probably not far off I expect.

Classic environmentalists making the acceptable the enemy of the clearly worse.

But in any case underwater data centres make zero sense. If you weren’t already convinced by using your brain for 5 seconds, Microsoft proved this a decade or two ago.

If you want easy access to seawater just build it on the coast. There’s a reason nuclear power stations are built on the coast and not underwater!

When we think about fascism we often do that by looking at the actors: Evil individuals doing evil things for evil reasons.

“Sophisticated” “analysis”…

Agreed. I use it for coding too. Even using it as a kind of interactive editor is a huge productivity boost. E.g. I was working on some assertions that were all like assert (... |-> a && b && c) (|-> is implication) and I was like "Claude, split the consequent conjunctions into separate assertions " and it did it in about 5 seconds, vs 10 minutes of tedious hand editing.

Yes indeed, the cheap models still produce slop. Slightly annoying because I’d love to use them for personal projects, but as you say I can’t really justify the cost.

For work though it’s a no brainer, given my salary and the productivity boost. At my previous company I sometimes spent an entire day debugging a complex test failure that Claude can figure out in 5 minutes. No exaggeration.

Clearly not, because people still have their culture and heritage. Theft requires taking something so that the victim no longer has it.

At least that was the dubious moral justification of pirates back in the day. (Not saying I don’t pirate, I just never justified it through word games.)

AI is built on massive data theft

Where are all the “copyright infringment isn’t theft” people now lol…

I’m not praising vibe coded slop. Vibe coding with the latest models doesn’t produce slop anymore. And I’m not really praising that - just saying that it’s true.

Nah just vibe code the stuff you host in Rust. These are all memory safety bugs.

My exception is Home Assistant which is unfortunately Python 🤢 but it’s not exposed to the internet.