tgo Devlog #3: Taming Context Windows, Compiling Lodash, and the Repetitive Reality of True Ownership

I’ve been making massive headway on tgo, my TypeScript to Go compiler library, but it is forcing me to confront some hard realities about how I manage systems, AI, and even people. The Cost of Scaling Complexity Since the last devlog, I’ve added full support for Node libraries— fs , path , process , and a few others. Right now, I’m in the trenches trying to compile Lodash, argparse , and date-fns . I pushed date-fns to the side for a minute because Lodash is proving to be the perfect stress test. It is, frankly, obnoxious. In some cases, the code is just very poorly written. Lodash has 316 different entry points. Right now, 122 are failing. But dealing with this massive, complex library has forced me to completely overhaul my test runner. I’ve built it so that you can choose specific entry points and compile only what you need—similar to how ES bundle works. I’ve also implemented heavy caching. If you are continually rebuilding, it won't re-compile the source to Go every single time; it just handles the binary compilation unless something actually changed. It’s significantly faster. But as this project scales, the sheer complexity is threatening to break the system—and by the system, I mean the AI I am using to build it. Process is Survival I do most of this development through AI, and getting an LLM to consistently output good software engineering without breaking existing features is incredibly difficult. I was constantly blowing out the context window. Even at 200,000 tokens, it wasn't enough. By the time the AI figured out what to do, it would start summarizing the context and immediately start doing a terrible job. This forced me to narrow down all possibilities. I realized there are really only four things I am ever asking the AI to do: Update the test runner. Fix a bug. Implement a new feature. Work on a library. That’s it. I defined strict workflows for those four pathways. If I ask it to fix a bug, it has to run the specific test, read the JavaScript, read