If you’re saying that LLMs trade idiomatic tools for ease-of-boilerplate-generation, shouldn’t that be a point against them, not in their favor?

Pardon the hyperbole but it’s a bit like lauding an IDE for automatically generating thousands of Java class stubs.

For decades you had the famous itertools recipes taunting you in the doc: https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html#itertools-r...

They were super useful, but not included in the stdlib, despite being a few lines long.

We also had more-itertools, bolton, and others, to bridge that gap.

Now, there was always a tension between adding more stuff to the stdlib, or letting 3rd party libs handle it. Remember the saying: the stdlib is where projects go to die.

And of course tensions about installing full on 3rd party libs just for a few functions.

The result is that many people copy/pasted a lot of small utilities, and endless debates on python-ideas to include some more.

I think this is going to slow down. Now if you want "def first_true(iterable, default=False, predicate=None)", you ask chatgpt, and you don't care.

The cost of adding those into the project is negligeable.

It's nowhere near generating thousand of class stubs. It's actually the opposite: very targetted, specific code needs being filled instead of haunting python debates or your venv.

But to stimulate a bit your anxiety, I do think code gen is going also making a big comeback with LLM :)

Agreed, rewriting standard functions is much worse than using standard tools that already exist.

In addition to the extra boilerplate and reduced readability, that also sounds like an easy way to introduce subtle bugs. Standard library functions have been exhaustively field tested, a similar looking LLM generated function could easily include a footgun.

Sure, but have you tried to introduce a new standard tool in the stdlib?

It's not a fun process.

Writing the code is the easy part.

And installing more-itertools for one functions is a bit silly

I wish there were some syntactic sugar for partial but knowing how patterns like that get abused in other languages maybe it is for the better that there isn't.

What would it look like? Wouldn't it just be lambda?

Yes, sugar so instead of having `partial(foo, w=1, x=2)` or `lambda y,z: foo(1,2,y,z)` just instead something like `foo(1,2,_,_)`

I wish it would at least be a method on any callable.

And itertools!