alt Hacker NewsThat is interesting. I make LLMs write C with the general hope that a simpler language they can manage well. That is not entirely true, though. They reason about C fluently indeed. The problem is, Claude pumps lots of bad C into the codebase if left unattended for 5 min. So, I need some clean-up passes afterwards to get to some acceptable quality level (both by LLMs and my own eyes). At which point, Claude sees the problem clearly, for some mysterious reason. Also, I use a C dialect heavly influenced by Go (slices, generics, no smart tricks, virtually no malloc).
> general hope that a simpler language they can manage well
It's the opposite; a language with lots of guardrails allows the AI to write better code especially as it is able to use the compiler and linter to guide it through the process. It's why OpenAI for example was able to disprove some recent theorem recently, due to the LLM converting its thoughts into a formal language theorem prover to then check its work.