The fakes vs mocks distinction here feels like a terminology debate masking violent agreement. What you’re describing as a “fake” is just a well-designed mock. The problem isn’t mocks as a concept, it’s mocking at the wrong layer.
The rule: mock what you own, at the boundaries you control.
The chaos you describe comes from mocking infrastructure directly. Verifying “deleteUserById was called exactly once with these params” is testing implementation, not behavior. Your HashMap-backed fake tests the right thing: is the user gone after the operation? Who cares how. The issue is finding the correct layers to validate behavior, not the implementation detail of mocks or fakes… that’s like complaining a hammer smashed a hole in the wall.
Google had a good 10 year run, where the ads were genuinely useful, until the need of the public markets required and lack of competition allowed them to enshitify the experience to the current state.
I hope the same fate does not await ChatGPT but in the mean time I expect it to be a pretty good experience at first.
I hate golang as language I just cannot get over how much I hate its syntax and I hate how verbose it is… however I do love that it is fast, compiles to a single binary and has a pretty nice standard library.
LLMs are the only way for me to make go usable.
The idea of “nice”, “high-quality” golang is an oxymoron. The very nature of the language makes it impossible to write nice high quality code… it’s designed by big tech to get college grads to pump out reams of garbage as fast as possible. LLMs are about as smart as college grads, so It was literally designed for LLMs to generate!
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.
"Golang is C with garbage collection"
I mean, Go isn’t C with GC - it’s C with:
- first-class concurrency (goroutines, channels)
- structural typing via interfaces
- a memory model safe enough for large-scale concurrent programs
- and tooling (formatter, linter, race detector, profiler) built in from day one.
That’s not just "C with GC."
That’s decades of language design evolution deliberately integrated into a cohesive, batteries-included ecosystem that others have failed at (Typescript) or just haven't reached in their lifecycle (like Kotlin).
The Pike quote you’re half-remembering is about teams btw, not about "dumbing down" - Google had (and still has) thousands of engineers working on massive distributed systems. Go’s tradeoff wasn’t "let’s design for idiots" - it was “let’s design for readability, maintainability, and concurrency at scale.”
That’s why Go codebases from 2011 still compile cleanly today with minimal changes. Try that with your "ergonomic" TypeScript stack where half your dependencies are deprecated next quarter.
When I moved to the Netherlands I was shocked to find out you have to maintain a registered address with the government.
The government also decides how many non-family members can register at an address, so in Amsterdam it is common for people to remain registered at there parents while subletting a room in an apartment.
You also get a DigiD which very convenient but also terrifying, especially when I walk around my neighborhood and see plaque’s in the ground for the victims of the holocaust who lived here.
My Dutch girlfriend does not believe me when I tell here that you don’t have to register where you live with the government in the anglophone world. It’s just so engrained in the society that anything else seems absurd.
Here in New Zealand, you're required to be enrolled to vote, even if you never intend to actually vote. Enrolling requires an address. I imagine it's similar in Australia, where actually voting is required by law.
I believe in New Zealand other government agencies aren't allowed to access your data without your consent though.
The problem is that there is a lot of bad python and typescript/javascript out there, and I similarly find my self having to define my coding style in context files in order to get decent results in newer code bases without a lot of examples to follow. And even then you need to say do it like @example.py all the time.
Maybe the future is fine-tuned models on specific coding styles?
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