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I just tried Grok 4 and it's insanely good. I was able to generate 1,000 lines of Java CDK code responsible for setting up an EC2 instance with certain pre-inst
by andreygrehov 1y ago
I just tried Grok 4 and it's insanely good. I was able to generate 1,000 lines of Java CDK code responsible for setting up an EC2 instance with certain pre-installed software. Grok produced all the code in one iteration. 1,000 lines of code, including VPC, Security Groups, etc. Zero syntax errors! Most importantly, it generated userData (#!/bin/bash commands) with accurate `wget` pointing to valid URLs of the latest software artifacts on GitHub. Insane!
- sudo-i 1y agoThe problem is that code as a 1-off is excellent, but as a maintainable piece of code that needs to be in source control, shared across teams, follow standard SLDC, be immutable, and track changes in some state - it's just not there. If an intern handed me code like this to deploy an EC2 instance in production, I would need to have a long discussion about their decisions.
- kvirani 1y agoBut isn't that just a few refactoring prompts away?
- sudo-i 1y ago<3
- nlarew 1y agoHow do you know? Have you seen the code GP generated?
- sudo-i 1y agoHow do you know?
- JohnMakin 1y agoNo, have you? They always seem to be missing from these types of posts. Personally I am skeptical, as AI has been abysmal at 1 shot provisioning actual quality cloud infrastructure. I wish it could, because it would make my life a lot less annoying. Unfortunately I have yet to really see it.
- tptacek 1y agoNo, they're not. People talk about LLM-generated code the same way they talk about any code they're responsible for producing; it's not in fact the norm for any discussion about code here to include links to the code. But if you're looking for success stories with code, they're easy to find. https://alexgaynor.net/2025/jun/20/serialize-some-der/ https://alexgaynor.net/2025/jun/20/serialize-some-der/
- albedoa 1y ago> it's not in fact the norm for any discussion about code here to include links to the code. I certainly didn't interpret "these types of posts" to mean "any discussion about code", and I highly doubt anyone else did. The top-level comment is making a significant claim, not a casual remark about code they produced. We should expect it to be presented with substantiating artifacts.
- tptacek 1y agoI guess. I kind of side-eyed the original one-shotting claim, not because I don't believe it, but because I don't believe it matters. Serious LLM-driven code generation runs in an iterative process. I'm not sure why first-output quality matters that much; I care about the outcome, not the intermediate steps. So if we're looking for stories about LLMs one-shotting high-quality code, accompanied by the generated code, I'm less sure of where those examples would be!
- JohnMakin 1y agoI could write a blog post exactly like this with my chatGPT history handy. That wasn't the point I was making. I am extremely skeptical of any claims that say someone can 1 shot quality cloud infrastructure without seeing what they produced. I'd even take away the 1-shot requirement - unless the person behind the prompt knows what they're doing, pretty much every example I've seen has been terrible.
- mellosouls 1y agoHow do you know without seeing the code? How do you know the criteria you mention hasn't (or can't) be factored into any prompt and context tuning? How do you know that all the criteria that was important in the pre-llm world still has the same priority as their capabilities increase?
- sim7c00 1y ago[flagged]
- zo1 1y agoI find this comment very ironic in the context of this thread. Let's agree to disagree.
- handfuloflight 1y agoThere's a chunk of the programming population who label everything they themselves didn't write as junk.
- sudo-i 1y agoAnyone using Java for IaC and Configuration Management in 2025 needs to reconsider their career decisions.
- tptacek 1y agoWhat does this have to do with anything? The Java constraint was supplied by a user, not the model.
- underdeserver 1y agoWhy? Modern Java - certainly since Java 8 - is pretty decent.
- nashadelic 1y agoI'd love to hear how grok works inside agentic coders like cursor or copilot for production code bases.
- doctoboggan 1y agoPlease share your result if possible. So many lines in a single shot with no errors would indeed be impressive. Does grok run tools for these sorts of queries? (linters/sandbox execution/web search)
- makestuff 1y agoOut of curiosity, why do you use Java instead of typescript for CDK? Just to keep everything in one language?
- oblio 1y agoWhy not, I would say? What's the advantage of using Typescript over modern Java?