Comment by ncruces

6 days ago

I don't know that there was an inflection point. I know that, over the past year, they definitely became useful to me as more than auto complete.

My most recent pet project is a transpiler from Wasm to Go, and I find it incredibly impressive that recent models (I've used Sonnet, Opus and Gemini, far more successfully than GPT), they're able to just pick up the project and work at all these levels:

- Go code that implements the transpiler (parsing Wasm, building an AST)

- Go code that gets generated by serializing the AST to a .go file

- Go code that manipulates the AST (to optimize it), and its effect on the generated code

- Go code that's grafted to the generated code (to implement more advanced opcodes) and how to interact with it from the AST

- C code that gets compiled to Wasm, then translated to Go, then called by Go

- Go code that gets called by this C code to implement a C stdlib

- WAT and WAST files that are used to implement the Wasm spec tests

I find this impressive because I have to think hard about all these levels, and I feel many programmers would have a problem with this.

And it's very often way easier for me to just write: "I want to generate this code, build me the AST that does it", than go "count parenthesis" in the Go code (I do have some LISP experience; it's still easier).

Feel free to scrutinize/criticize the code. Not vibe coded, but plenty of GenAI help.