Yes it is a skill issue - I lack the skill to enjoy programming in a language with the ergonomics of something from the 70s. Golang is C with garbage collection
They’re complaining about mediocre AI-generated Go code, when Go was explicitly designed to optimize for mediocrity at scale. Rob Pike literally said they designed it for programmers who “are not capable of understanding a brilliant language.” The language deliberately trades expressiveness for simplicity so that huge teams of junior engineers can’t shoot themselves in the foot.
LLMs are basically junior engineers with perfect syntax recall. Of course they generate Go well, verbose, explicit, no clever abstractions. That’s not a bug, it’s the entire design philosophy.
For most of my work, TypeScript/Node is plenty fast and I can work fullstack in one language. When I actually need performance, Rust gives me control without random GC pauses. And if I need a GC language with good ergonomics, Kotlin on the JVM is miles ahead.
Go made sense in 2010 when Google needed to get thousands of new grads productive quickly. But those tradeoffs, sacrificing language quality for organizational scale - are exactly why it’s perfect for AI generation. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t design a language for the lowest common denominator and then be surprised when AI hits exactly that bar.
They’re complaining about mediocre AI-generated Go code, when Go was explicitly designed to optimize for mediocrity at scale. Rob Pike literally said they designed it for programmers who “are not capable of understanding a brilliant language.” The language deliberately trades expressiveness for simplicity so that huge teams of junior engineers can’t shoot themselves in the foot.
LLMs are basically junior engineers with perfect syntax recall. Of course they generate Go well, verbose, explicit, no clever abstractions. That’s not a bug, it’s the entire design philosophy.
For most of my work, TypeScript/Node is plenty fast and I can work fullstack in one language. When I actually need performance, Rust gives me control without random GC pauses. And if I need a GC language with good ergonomics, Kotlin on the JVM is miles ahead.
Go made sense in 2010 when Google needed to get thousands of new grads productive quickly. But those tradeoffs, sacrificing language quality for organizational scale - are exactly why it’s perfect for AI generation. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t design a language for the lowest common denominator and then be surprised when AI hits exactly that bar.