I try to pick the language best to the situation rather than giving into my own biases. I need to broaden my horizon to be able to cover the full stack of stuff that I need, not just the things I've been doing myself a lot for years. There's a lot of stuff that used to be out of my comfort zone that I can now tackle easily. Stepping over my own biases is part of that.

I know not everybody is quite ready for this yet. But I'm working from the point of view that I won't be manually programming much professionally anymore.

So, I now pick stuff I know AIs supposedly do well (like Go) with good solid tool and library ecosystems. I can read it well enough; it's not a hard language and I've seen plenty other languages. But I'm clearly not going to micro manage a Go code base any time soon. The first time I did this, it was an experiment. I wanted to see how far I could push the notion. I actually gave it some thought and then I realized that if I was going to do this manually I would pick what I always pick. But I just wasn't planning to do this manually and it wasn't optimal for the situation. It just wasn't a valid choice anymore.

Then I repeated the experiment again on a bigger thing and I found that I could have a high level discussion about architectural choices well enough that it did not really slow me down much. The opposite actually. I just ask critical questions. I try to make sure to stick with mainstream stuff and not get boxed into unnecessary complexity. A few decades in this industry has given me a nose for that.

My lack of familiarity with the code base is so far not proving to be any issue. Early days, I know. But I'm generating an order of magnitude more code than I'll ever be able to review already and this is only going to escalate from here on. I don't see a reason for me to slow down. To be effective, I need to engineer at a macro level. I simply can't afford to micro manage code bases anymore. That means orchestrating good guard rails, tests, specifications, etc. and making sure those cover everything I care about. Precisely because I don't want to have to open an editor and start fixing things manually.

As for Rust, that was me not thinking about my prompt too hard and it had implemented something half decent by the time I realized so I just went with it. To be clear, this one is just a side project. So, I let it go (out of curiosity) and it seems to be fine as well. Apparently, I can do Rust now too. It's actually not a bad choice objectively and so far so good. The thing is, I can change my mind and redo the whole thing from scratch and it would not be that expensive if I had to.