🔗 Which language is best for AI code generation?

How do you pick a tech stack for a new project?

If it was five years ago, it was fairly straightforward. There were two basic questions: first, which language/framework is the best to solve the problem at hand; and second, what language and tooling are you and your team familiar with. And then you get cracking hacking.

But it’s 2025, and love it or loathe it (opinions seem to only exist at those two extremes), AI code generation is here to stay. Even if you vehemently reject robotic assistance when writing your codebase, you can be fairly certain that robotic assistance will be used to maintain it. And so if we’re following the adage that you’re not writing the code for yourself, but rather for the engineer who comes after, we should at least consider how well LLMs can handle the language you choose. Follow the advice of John Woods (“always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live”) and consider that the ire of your colleagues might come from how bad the AI is at helping them fix up your broken code.

I used to be convinced that there are really only two games in town when it comes to “the best language to use with AI” – Python and JavaScript. But I ran across a paper on ArXiv recently (or rather, someone tweeted it at José Valim) that caught my eye. It’s indicated that there might be more here than meets the eye, and that the foretold dominance of those two languages when it comes to AI codegen isn’t actually assured. Maybe the future of code includes other languages like – dare I mention it – Elixir?

(Of course I was going to say Elixir: this is Revelry. And I just mentioned José.)