Comment by andreygrehov
7 months ago
I just tried Grok 4 and it's insanely good. I was able to generate 1,000 lines of Java CDK code responsible for setting up an EC2 instance with certain pre-installed software. Grok produced all the code in one iteration. 1,000 lines of code, including VPC, Security Groups, etc. Zero syntax errors! Most importantly, it generated userData (#!/bin/bash commands) with accurate `wget` pointing to valid URLs of the latest software artifacts on GitHub. Insane!
The problem is that code as a 1-off is excellent, but as a maintainable piece of code that needs to be in source control, shared across teams, follow standard SLDC, be immutable, and track changes in some state - it's just not there.
If an intern handed me code like this to deploy an EC2 instance in production, I would need to have a long discussion about their decisions.
How do you know without seeing the code?
How do you know the criteria you mention hasn't (or can't) be factored into any prompt and context tuning?
How do you know that all the criteria that was important in the pre-llm world still has the same priority as their capabilities increase?
Anyone using Java for IaC and Configuration Management in 2025 needs to reconsider their career decisions.
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How do you know? Have you seen the code GP generated?
No, have you? They always seem to be missing from these types of posts. Personally I am skeptical, as AI has been abysmal at 1 shot provisioning actual quality cloud infrastructure. I wish it could, because it would make my life a lot less annoying. Unfortunately I have yet to really see it.
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How do you know?
But isn't that just a few refactoring prompts away?
<3
I'd love to hear how grok works inside agentic coders like cursor or copilot for production code bases.
Please share your result if possible. So many lines in a single shot with no errors would indeed be impressive. Does grok run tools for these sorts of queries? (linters/sandbox execution/web search)
Out of curiosity, why do you use Java instead of typescript for CDK? Just to keep everything in one language?
Why not, I would say? What's the advantage of using Typescript over modern Java?