Hacker News Reader

Comment by liveoneggs | Hacker News Reader

Claude still has to write software in a target language, often using an established framework, especially one with a lot of examples.

PHP is, in fact, exceptionally good as a language for creating websites.

View on HN

A web accessible PHP runtime is, in fact, a giant security vulnerability and always had been.

lol my defense is still timely I swear!

A web accessible runtime, regardless of language of origin, is a giant security vulnerability and always has been. Despite language purists insistence to the contrary there isn't a secure language ecosystem, never has been, and all current evidence suggests there never will be.

also the best code is usually less code, and frameworks can be really helpful there.

One of the appeals of LLM-generated code, to me, is that you can often write things without a framework and reduce the total amount of code in the system, which tends to make it much more understandable overall.

LLMs are infamous for generating unnecessarily complex and inefficient code. And it was always possible to write things without a framework, people just refused to do so.

In my experience LLMs are mostly very keen to write a function themselves instead of reach for a library. The code itself tends to be pretty straightforward and if anything is characterised by a lack of extra abstractions. What that usually means is that you have more code that the LLM has written and less code that you are depending on in libraries. If you are concerned about understanding the system as a whole this is less total to deal with. Previously, you could also write this way (i.e. without a framework and with relatively few libraries), but it would be a lot slower.

Frankly everything is now. Anyone can use Rust or Go for this now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com