10 ms·

I built a programming language using Claude Code

• andsoitis 7mo ago
  > While working on Cutlet, though, I allowed Claude to generate every single line of code. I didn’t even read any of the code. Instead, I built guardrails to make sure it worked correctly (more on that later). Impressive. As a practical matter, one wonders what th point would be in creating a new programming languages if the programmer no longer has to write or read code. Programming languages are after all the interface that a human uses to give instructions to a computer. If you’re not writing or reading it, the language, by definition doesn’t matter.
  • johnfn 7mo ago
    > If you’re not writing or reading it, the language, by definition doesn’t matter. By what definition? It still matters if I write my app in Rust vs say Python because the Rust version still have better performance characteristics.
  • johnbender 7mo ago
    In principle (and we hope in practice) the person is still responsible for the consequences of running the code and so it remains important they can read and understand what has been generated.
  • _aavaa_ 7mo ago
    I don’t agree with the idea that programming languages don’t have an impact of an LLM to write code. If anything, I imagine that, all else being equal, a language where the compiler enforces multiple levels of correctness would help the AI get to a goal faster.
    • jetbalsa 7mo ago
      That is why Typescript is the main one used by most people vibe coding, The LLMs do like to work around the type engine in it sometimes, but strong typing and linting can help a ton in it.
    • phn 7mo ago
      A good example of this is Rust. Rust is by default memory safe when compared to say, C, at the expense of you having to be deliberate in managing memory. With LLMs this equation changes significantly because that harder/more verbose code is being written by the LLM, so it won't slow you down nearly as much. Even better, the LLM can interact with the compiler if something is not exactly as it should. On a different but related note, it's almost the same as pairing django or rails with an LLM. The framework allows you to trust that things like authentication and a passable code organization are being correctly handled.
      • munksbeer 7mo ago
        I was under the impression from Rust developers that it was one of the languages LLMs struggled with a bit more than others? My view could be (probably is) very outdated.
        • hombre_fatal 7mo ago
          If it were ever true, it's not anymore. Rust is a nice choice even just for its amazing sum types and the ability to make impossible states unrepresentable at the type level.
  • andyfilms1 7mo ago
    I've been wondering if a diffusion model could just generate software as binary that could be fed directly into memory.
    • entropie 7mo ago
      Yeah, what could go wrong.
  • marssaxman 7mo ago
    The constraints enforced in the language still matter. A language which offers certain correctness guarantees may still be the most efficient way to build a particular piece of software even when it's a machine writing the code. There may actually be more value in creating specialized languages now, not less. Most new languages historically go nowhere because convincing human programmers to spend the time it would take to learn them is difficult, but every AI coding bot will learn your new language as a matter of course after its next update includes the contents of your website.
    • danielvaughn 7mo ago
      In addition, I think token efficiency will continue to be a problem. So you could imagine very terse programming languages that are roughly readable for a human, but optimized to be read by LLMs.
      • idiotsecant 7mo ago
        I think I remember seeing research right here on HN that terse languages don't actually help all that much
        • thomasmg 7mo ago
          I would be very interested in this research... I'm trying to write a language that is simple and concise like Python, but fast and statically typed. My gutfeeling is that more concise than Python (J, K, or some code golfing language) is bad for readability, but so is the verbosity of Rust, Zig, Java.
          • rurban 7mo ago
            So check https://github.com/google/rune https://github.com/google/rune
      • Insanity 7mo ago
        That's an interesting idea. But IMO the real 'token saver' isn't in the language keywords but it's in the naming of things like variables, classes, etc. There are languages that are already pretty sparse with keywords. e.g in Go you can write 'func main() string', no need to define that it's public, or static etc. So combining a less verbose language with 'codegolfing' the variables might be enough.
  • spelunker 7mo ago
    Like everything generated by LLMs though, it is built on the shoulders of giants - what will happen to software if no one is creating new programming languages anymore? Does that matter?
    • idiotsecant 7mo ago
      I think the only hope is that AGI arises and picks up where humanity left off. Otherwise I think this is the long dark teatime of human engineering of all sorts.
      • tartoran 7mo ago
        So you’re hoping for a blackbox uninspectable by humans? That to me sounds like a nightmare, a nightmare worse than all the cruft and stupid rules humanity accrued over time. Let’s hope the future tech is inspectable and understandable by humans.
        • idiotsecant 7mo ago
          I think if we assume that AGI will be a thing the odds of future tech remaining inspectable by humans is pretty unlikely. Would you build a car so that your dog can maintain it?
          • tartoran 7mo ago
            Fully understandable end to end by any normal human and inspectable enough for human governance are different things. In any sane world, AGI would be built inside a human institutional environment: laws, audits, liability, safety engineering, access controls, operational constraints, etc. We do not build planes so passengers can reconstruct the turbine from scratch, but we still require them to be inspectable by the people responsible for certifying/repairing them. The right standard is not whether an average person can rebuild or fully undestand the whole machine, but whether human institutions can reliably inspect, verify and govern it. If they can’t, then the technology is not mature enough to trust.
        • 7mo ago
  • onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago
    > Impressive. As a practical matter, one wonders what th point would be in creating a new programming languages if the programmer no longer has to write or read code. I'm working on a language as well (hoping to debut by end of month), but the premise of the language is that it's designed like so: 1) It maximizes local reasoning and minimizes global complexity 2) It makes the vast majority of bugs / illegal states impossible to represent 3) It makes writing correct, concurrent code as maximally expressive as possible (where LLMs excel) 4) It maximizes optionality for performance increases (it's always just flipping option switches - mostly at the class and function input level, occassionaly at the instruction level) The idea is that it should be as easy as possible for an LLM to write it (especially convert other languages to), and as easy as possible for you to understand it, while being almost as fast as absolutely perfect C code, and by virtue of the design of the language - at the human review phase you have minimal concerns of hidden gotcha bugs.
    • idiotsecant 7mo ago
      How does a programming language prevent the vast majority of bugs? I feel like we would all be using that language!
      • gf000 7mo ago
        I agree with your questioning of it being capable of preventing bugs, but your second point is quite likely false -- we have developed a bunch of very useful abstractions in "research" languages 50 years ago, only to re-discover them today (no null, algebraic data types, pattern matching, etc).
      • onlyrealcuzzo 7mo ago
        See Rust with Use-after-Free, fearless concurrency, etc. My language is a step ahead of Rust, but not as strict as Ada, while being easier to read than Swift (especially where concurrency is involved).
        • rurban 7mo ago
          And whenever someone tells you to lookup "Fearless concurrency", replace it internally with "Locking concurrency". Thanks to the Rust marketing department
  • koolala 7mo ago
    Saves tokens. The main reason though is to manage performance for what techniques get used for specific use cases. In their case it seems to be about expressiveness in Bash.
  • voxleone 7mo ago
    In the 90s people hoped Unified Modeling Language diagrams would generate software automatically. That mostly didn’t happen. But large language models might actually be the realization of that old dream. Instead of formal diagrams, we describe the system in natural language and the model produces the code. It reminds me of the old debates around visual web tools vs hand-written HTML. There seems to be a recurring pattern: every step up the abstraction ladder creates tension between people who prefer the new layer and those who want to stay closer to the underlying mechanics. Roughly: machine code --> assembly --> C --> high-level languages --> frameworks --> visual tools --> LLM-assisted coding. Most of those transitions were controversial at the time, but in retrospect they mostly expanded the toolbox rather than replacing the lower layers. One workflow I’ve found useful with LLMs is to treat them more like a code generator after the design phase. I first define the constraints, objects, actors, and flows of the system, then use structured prompts to generate or refine pieces of the implementation.
    • abraxas 7mo ago
      I agree with the sentiment but want to point out that the biggest drive behind UML was the enrichment of Rational Software and its founders. I doubt anyone ever succeeded in implementing anything useful with Rational Rose. But the Rational guys did have a phenomenal exit and that's probably the biggest success story of UML. I'm being slightly facetious of course, I still use sequence diagrams and find them useful. The rest of its legacy though, not so much.
  • eatsyourtacos 7mo ago
    I have been building a game via a separate game logic library and Unity (which includes that independent library).. let's just say that over the last couple weeks I have 100% lost the need to do the coding myself. I keep iterating and have it improve and there are hundreds of unit tests.. I have a Unity MCP and it does 95% of the Unity work for me. Of course the real game will need custom designing and all that; but in terms of getting a complete prototype setup.... I am literally no longer the coder. I just did in a week what it would have taken me months and months and months to do. Granted Unity is still somewhat new to, but still.. even if you are an expert- it can immediately look at all your game objects and detect issues etc. So yeah for some things we are already at the point of "I am not longer the coder, I am the architect".. and it's scary.
    • nineteen999 7mo ago
      100% same experience with Claude and Unreal Engine 5 over here. And as the game moves from "less scaffolding" towards "more code", Claude actually is getting better at one-shotting things than it ever was - probably due to there being a lot more examples in the codebase of how to handle things under different scenarious (world compositing, multiplayer etc etc).
  • michaelbrave 7mo ago
    a few months back I had a similar thought and started working on a language that was really verbose and human readable, think Cobal with influences from Swift. The core idea was that this would be a business language that business people would/could read if they needed to, so it could be used for financial and similar use cases, with built in logic engines similar to Prolog or Mercury. My idea was that once the language starts being coded by AI there are two directions to go, either we max efficiency and speed (basically let the AI code in assembly) or we lean the other way and max it for human error checking and clear outputs on how a process flows, so my theory was headed more in that direction. But of course I failed, I'd never made a programming language before (I've coded a long time, but that's not the same thing) and the AI's at the time combined with my lack of knowledge caused a spectacular failure. I still think my theory is correct though, especially if we want to see financial or business logic, having the code be more human readable to check for problems when even not a technical person, I still see a future where that is useful.
• ramon156 7mo ago
  AI written code with a human writted blog post, that's a big step up. That said, it's a lot of words to say not a lot of things. Still a cool post, though!
  • ivanjermakov 7mo ago
    > with a human writted blog post I believe we're at a point where it's not possible to accurately decide whether text is completely written by human, by computer, or something in between.
    • wavemode 7mo ago
      We're definitely not at that point. If this blog post is unedited LLM output, the blog owner needs to sell whatever model, setup and/or prompt he used for a million dollars, since it's clearly far beyond the state-of-the-art in terms of natural-sounding tone.
      • craigmart 7mo ago
        You can make an LLM sound very natural if you simply ask for it and provide enough text in the tone you’d like it to reproduce. Otherwise, it’s obvious that an LLM with no additional context will try to stick to the tone the company aligned it to produce
        • exitb 7mo ago
          ”I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that.” I’ve never seen LLM being able to produce these kind of absurdist jokes. Or any jokes, really.
          • craigmart 7mo ago
            comedy is a completely different thing than natural tone. I agree that they’re incapable of coming up with decent jokes
• righthand 7mo ago
  > I’ve also been able to radically reduce my dependency on third-party libraries in my JavaScript and Python projects. I often use LLMs to generate small utility functions that previously required pulling in dependencies from NPM or PyPI. This is such an interesting statement to me in the context of leftpad.
  • rpowers 7mo ago
    I'm imagining the amount of energy required to power the datacenter so that we can produce isEven() utility methods.
    • nefarious_ends 7mo ago
      we need a caching layer
    • righthand 7mo ago
      Also, neither over the wire dependency issues or code injection issues (the two major criticisms) are solved by using an llm to produce the code. Talk about shifting complexity. It would be better if every LSP had a general utility library generator built in.
    • BoredomIsFun 7mo ago
      You could always run local on your 5060ti.
• amelius 7mo ago
  The AI age is calling for a language that is append-only, so we can write in a literate programming style and mix prompts with AI output, in a linear way.
  • geon 7mo ago
    That’s git commits.
    • scottmf 7mo ago
      or css
    • amelius 7mo ago
      That's arguably not very ergonomic, which is probably the biggest requirement for a programming language.
      • beepbooptheory 7mo ago
        Why care about ergonomics if you're not going to write the code?
        • amelius 7mo ago
          Managers also want ergonomics.
  • koolala 7mo ago
    A REPL + immutability?
    • zvqcMMV6Zcr 7mo ago
      Does immutability implies using only open weight models? Both Anthropic and OpenAI keep deprecating/removing ability to run older versions of their models. And that means all previously recorded prompts would now produce slightly different output.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• tines 7mo ago
  Next you can let Claude play your video games for you as well. Gads we are a voyeuristic society aren’t we.
  • jetbalsa 7mo ago
    I am kind of doing that now. I put Kimi K2.5 into a Ralph Loop to make a Screeps.com AI. So far its been awful at it. If you want to track its progress, I have its dashboard at https://balsa.info https://balsa.info
  • theblazehen 7mo ago
    Here's Claude playing Detroit: Become Human https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcr7G1Cuzwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcr7G1Cuzwk
  • ajay-b 7mo ago
    Why not let Claude do our dating? I'm surprised someone hasn't thought of this: AI dating, let the AI find and qualify a date for you, and match with the person who meets you, for you!
    • g3f32r 7mo ago
      I suspect this is going to be an iteration of the Simpsons meme soon, but... Black Mirror did it first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ
  • knicholes 7mo ago
    Honestly some of the most fun I had playing Ultima Online was writing scripts to play it for me.
    • monster_truck 7mo ago
      The stun -> disarm -> pickpocket -> bludgeon defenseless player scripts are still the most fun I've ever had in an MMO.
  • 7mo ago
• jaggederest 7mo ago
  I think we're going to see a lot more of this. I've done a similar thing, hosting a toy language on haskell, and it was remarkably easy to get something useful and usable, in basically a weekend. If you keep the surface area small enough you can now make a fully fledged, compiled language for basically every single purpose you'd like, and coevolve the language, the code, and the compiler
  • soperj 7mo ago
    We did this in 4th year comp-sci.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • marginalia_nu 7mo ago
    Yeah it's a rewarding project. Getting a language that kinda works is surprisingly accessible. Though we must be mindful that this is still the "draw some circles" pane. Producing the rest of the rest of the famous owl is, as always, the hard bit.
    • Copyrightest 7mo ago
      [dead]
• aplomb1026 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• craigmcnamara 7mo ago
  Now anyone can be a Larry Wall, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.
  • nz 7mo ago
    This is not exactly novel. In the 2000s, someone made a fully functioning Perl 6 runtime in a very short amount of time (a month, IIRC) using Haskell. The various Lisps/Schemes have always given you the ability to implement specialized languages even more quickly and ergonomically than Haskell (IMHO). This latest fever for LLMs simply confirms that people would rather do _anything_ other than program in a (not necessarily purely) functional language that has meta-programming facilities. I personally blame functional fixedness (psychological concept). In my experience, when someone learns to program in a particular paradigm or language, they are rarely able or willing to migrate to a different one (I know many people who refused to code in anything that did not look and feel like Java, until forced to by their growling bellies). The AI/LLM companies are basically (and perhaps unintentionally) treating that mental inertia as a business opportunity (which, in one way or another, it was for many decades and still is -- and will probably continue to be well into a post-AGI future).
• kerkeslager 7mo ago
  > While working on Cutlet, though, I allowed Claude to generate every single line of code. I didn’t even read any of the code. Instead, I built guardrails to make sure it worked correctly (more on that later). The "more on that later" was unit tests (also generated by Claude Code) and sample inputs and outputs (which is basically just unit tests by a different name). This is... horrifically bad. It's stupidly easy to make unit tests pass with broken code, and even more stupidly easy when the test is also broken. These "guardrails" are made of silly putty. EDIT: Would downvoters care to share an explanation? Preferably one they thought of?
• dehkopolis 7mo ago
  [dead]
• pluc 7mo ago
  Claude Code built a programming language using you
• laweijfmvo 7mo ago
  Using LLMs to invent new programming languages is a mystery to me. Who or what is going to use this? Presumably not the author.
  • matthews3 7mo ago
    AI generate some feedback, then just move onto the next project, and repeat.
• octoclaw 7mo ago
  [dead]
• mriet 7mo ago
  Wait. You built a new language, that there's thus no training data for. Who the hell is going to use it then? You certainly won't, because you're dependent on AI.
  • logicprog 7mo ago
    "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • croes 7mo ago
      It isn’t shallow. Who’s going to use it?
      • fcatalan 7mo ago
        You tell the agent to write a whimsical tutorial book about the language, it takes about an hour :)
    • Bnjoroge 7mo ago
      it's a valid question and one that everyone should be asking, unless ofcourse it's for fun which is what I believe this is.
    • lelanthran 7mo ago
      I don't consider this to be a shallow dismissal. It's a deep dismissal that gets right to the heart of the matter in a few succinct sentences.
  • koolala 7mo ago
    With clear examples in their context they don't need training data.
  • dankwizard 7mo ago
    We're in the process of migrating our entire code base over to this new language (One of the big 4 banks) - Keen to add early adopters to our resumes : - )
• jcranmer 7mo ago
  I recently tried using Claude to generate a lexer and parser for a language i was designing. As part of its first attempt, this was the code to parse a float literal: fn read_float_literal(&mut self) -> &'a str { let start = self.pos; while let Some(ch) = self.peek_char() { if ch.is_ascii_alphanumeric() || ch == '.' || ch == '+' || ch == '-' { self.advance_char(); } else { break; } } &self.source[start..self.pos] } Admittedly, I do have a very idiosyncratic definition of floating-point literal for my language (I have a variety of syntaxes for NaNs with payloads), but... that is not a usable definition of float literal. At the end of the day, I threw out all of the code the AI generated and wrote it myself, because the AI struggled to produce code that was functional to spec, much less code that would allow me to easily extend it to other kinds of future operators that I knew I would need in the future.
  • dboreham 7mo ago
    I had a somewhat experience with Claude coding an Occam parser but I just let it do it's thing and once I had presented it with a suitable suite of test source code, it course corrected, refactored and ended up with a reasonable solution. The journey was a bit different to an experienced human developer but the results much the same and perhaps 100X cheaper.
    • jcranmer 7mo ago
      Some of the issues are undoubtedly that I have a decidedly non-standard architecture for my system that the AI refuses to acknowledge--it hallucinated things like integers, which isn't a part of my system, simply because what I have looks almost like a standard example expression grammar so clearly I must have all of the standard example expression grammar things. (This is a pretty common failure mode I've noticed in AI-based systems--when the thing you're looking for is very similar to a very notable, popular thing, AI systems tend to assume you mean the latter as opposed to the former.)
• bobjordan 7mo ago
  I've been working on a large codebase that was already significant before LLM-assisted programming, leveraging code I’d written over a decade ago. Since integrating Claude and Codex, the system has evolved and grown massively. Realistically, there’s a lot in there now that I simply couldn't have built in a standard human lifetime without them. That said, the core value of the software wouldn't exist without a human at the helm. It requires someone to expend the energy to guide it, explore the problem space, and weave hundreds of micro-plans into a coherent, usable system. It's a symbiotic relationship, but the ownership is clear. It’s like building a house: I could build one with a butter knife given enough time, but I'd rather use power tools. The tools don't own the house. At this point, LLMs aren't going to autonomously architect a 400+ table schema, network 100+ services together, and build the UI/UX/CLI to interface with it all. Maybe we'll get there one day, but right now, building software at this scale still requires us to drive. I believe the author owns the language.
  • wcarss 7mo ago
    This is the take, very well said. I've been trying to use analogies with cars and cabinet making, but building a house is just right for the scale and complexity of the efforts enabled, and the ownership idea threads into it well. Going into the vault!
  • heavyset_go 7mo ago
    > I believe the author owns the language. Not according to the US Copyright Office. It is 100% LLM output, so it is not copyrighted, thus it's free for anyone to do anything with it and no claimed ownership or license can stop them.
    • wild_egg 7mo ago
      Do you have a citation for that?
      • heavyset_go 7mo ago
        Yes[1]. Copyright applies to human creations, not machine generated output. It's possible to use AI output in human created content, and it can be copyrightable, and substantiative, transformative human-creative alteration of AI output is also copyrightable. 100% machine generated code is not copyrightable. [1] https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part-2-of-artificial-intelligence-report/s/f3959c36-d616-498d-b8f9-67641fd18babl https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...
• p0w3n3d 7mo ago
  I'd say these times will be filled with a lot of tailored-to-you "self"-made software, but the question is, are we increasing amount of information in the world? I heard that claude and chatgpt are getting good at mathematical proofs which give really something to our knowledge, but all other things are neutral to entropy, if not decreasing. Strange time to live in, strange valuations and devaluations...
  • NuclearPM 7mo ago
    Neutral to entropy? What do you mean?
• dwedge 7mo ago
  Admittedly I only skimmed this, but I found it interesting that they came to the conclusion that Claude is really bad at (thing they know how to do, and therefore judge ) and really good at (thing they don't know how to do or judge). I mean, they may be right but there is also a big opportunity for this being Gell-Mann amnesia : "The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable about."
  • mrsmrtss 7mo ago
    I had the exact same thoughts reading it.
• Bnjoroge 7mo ago
  Not to discount your experience, but I dont understand what's interesting about this. You could always build a programming language yourself, given enough time. Programming languages' constructs are well represented in the training dataset. I want someone to build something uniquely novel that's not actually in the dataset and i'll be impressed by CC.
  • UncleEntity 7mo ago
    I find it as an interesting experiment to find the limits of what they can do. Like, I've had it build a full APL interpreter, half an optimizer, started on a copy-and-patch JIT compiler and it completely fails at "read the spec and make sure the test suite ensures compliance". Plus some additional artifacts which are genuinely useful on their own as I now have an Automated Yak Shaver™ which is where most of my projects ended up dying as the yaks are a fun bunch to play with.
• atoav 7mo ago
  I rolled a fair dice using ChatGPT.
• shevy-java 7mo ago
  That was step #1. Step #2 is: get real people to use it!
• aleksiy123 7mo ago
  One topic of llms not doing well with UI and visuals. I've been trying a new approach I call CLI first. I realized CLI tools are designed to be used both by humans (command line) and machines (scripting), and are perfect for llms as they are text only interface. Essentially instead of trying to get llm to generate a fully functioning UI app. You focus on building a local CLI tool first. CLI tool is cheaper, simpler, but still has a real human UX that pure APIs don't. You can get the llm to actually walk through the flows, and journeys like a real user end to end, and it will actually see the awkwardness or gaps in design. Your commands structure will very roughly map to your resources or pages. Once you are satisfied with the capability of the cli tool. (Which may actually be enough, or just local ui) You can get it to build the remote storage, then the apis, finally the frontend. All the while you can still tell it to use the cli to test through the flows and journeys, against real tasks that you have, and iterate on it. I did recently for pulling some of my personal financial data and reporting it. And now I'm doing this for another TTS automation I've wanted for a while.
• iberator 7mo ago
  Nope. You didn't write it. You plagiarized it. AI is bad
  • cptroot 7mo ago
    If you read TFA, you'll find that the author agrees with you - at least on your first point. While I agree "AI is bad", well-written posts like this one can provide real insight into the process of using them, and reveal more about _why_ AI is bad.
• grumpyprole 7mo ago
  Does this really test Claude in a useful way? Is building a highly derivative programming language a useful use case? Claude has probably indexed all existing implementations of imperative dynamic languages and is basically spewing slop based on that vibe. Rather than super flexible, super unsafe languages, we need languages with guardrails, restrictions and expressive types, now more than ever. Maybe LLMs could help with that? I'm not sure, it would certainly need guidance from a human expert at every step.
• zahirbmirza 7mo ago
  "Just one more prompt..." I can relate. who else has been affected by this?
  • ractive 7mo ago
    Yes, it completely sucks you in and you do "just one more prompt" until late in the night. And somehow you wake up with headache the next morning...
• jackby03 7mo ago
  Curious how you handled context management as the project grew — did you end up with a single CLAUDE.md or something more structured? I've been thinking about this problem and working on a standard for it.
• dybber 7mo ago
  I have been trying this as well, and you can quickly come very far. However, I fear that agents will always work better on programming languages they have been heavily trained on, so for an agent-based development inventing a new domain specific language (e.g. for use internally in a company) might not be as efficient as using a generic programming language that models are already trained on and then just live with the extra boilerplate necessary.
• asciimov 7mo ago
  This takes all the satisfaction out of spending a few well thought out weekends to build your own language. So many fun options: compiled or interpreted; virtual machine, or not; single pass, double pass, or (Leeloo Dallas) Multipass? No cool BNF grammars to show off either… It’s missing all the heart, the soul, of deciding and trading off options to get something to work just for you. It’s like you bought a rat bike from your local junkyard and are trying to pass it off as your own handmade cafe racer.
  • NuclearPM 7mo ago
    Deciding on the syntax and semantics myself and using AI to help implement my toy language has been very rewarding. Mine is an Io and Rebol inspired language that uses SQlite and Luajit as a runtime. 1.to 10 .map[n | n * n].each[n | n.say!]
  • fcatalan 7mo ago
    This enables different satisfactions. You can still choose all your options but have a working repl or small compiler where you are trying them within minutes. Also you decide how much in control you are. Want to provide a hand made grammar? go ahead, want the agent to come up with it just from chatting and pointing it to other languages, ok too. Want to program just the first arithmetic operator yourself and then save the tedium of typing all the others so you can go to the next step? fine... So you can have a huge toy language in mere days and experiment with stuff you'd have to build for months by hand to be able to play with.
• shadeslayer 7mo ago
  It’s been a while friend Congratulations on getting to the front page ;)
• gopalv 7mo ago
  > More addictive than that is the unpredictability and randomness inherent to these tools. If you throw a problem at Claude, you can never tell what it will come up with. It could one-shot a difficult problem you’ve been stuck on for weeks, or it could make a huge mess. Just like a slot machine, you can never tell what might happen. That creates a strong urge to try using it for everything all the time. That is the part of the post that stuck with me, because I've also picked up impossible challenges and tried to get Claude to dig me out of a mess without giving up from very vague instructions[1]. The effect feels like the Loss-Disguised-As-Win feeling of the video-games I used to work on at Zynga. Sure it made a mistake, but it is right there, you could go again. Pull the lever, doesn't matter if the kids have Karate at 8 AM. [1] - https://github.com/t3rmin4t0r/magic-partitioning https://github.com/t3rmin4t0r/magic-partitioning
  • fud101 7mo ago
    > The effect feels like the Loss-Disguised-As-Win feeling of the video-games I used to work on at Zynga. If you can write a blogpost for this i'd like to read it.
    • thoughtpeddler 7mo ago
      This post (https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/ https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/) covers this well already. > This sounds like the Loss Disguised as a Win concept from gambling addiction. Consider the hundreds of lines of code, all the apps being created: some of these are genuinely useful, but much of this code is too complex to maintain or modify in the future, and it often contains hidden bugs.
• randallsquared 7mo ago
  > The @ meta operator also works with comparisons. I haven't read any farther than this, yet, but this made me stutter in my reading. Isn't a comparison just a function that takes two arguments and returns a third? How is that different from "+"?
• ractive 7mo ago
  > [...] “just one more prompt” [...]. That creates a strong urge to try using it for everything all the time. And just like with slot machines, the [house](https://www.anthropic.com https://www.anthropic.com) always wins. I really liked that part - the house always wins.
• singularity2001 7mo ago
  same: https://github.com/pannous/warp https://github.com/pannous/warp
• monster_truck 7mo ago
  Same but Codex, still chipping away at it. https://github.com/doublemover/Slopjective-C https://github.com/doublemover/Slopjective-C It has not had any issues at all writing objc3 code
  • Copyrightest 7mo ago
    [dead]
• emh68 7mo ago
  Okay I'll add mine too. I recently vibe-coded a Ruby interpreter, as a single-header C file, meant to be embedded (like Lua or mruby). I call it Luby: https://halferty.dev/index.php/luby-single-header-embeddable-ruby-interpreter https://halferty.dev/index.php/luby-single-header-embeddable...
• esafak 7mo ago
  This was a missed opportunity to showcase how to use formal methods for proof of correctness. The author does not even seem to be particularly interested in programming language design; there is no discussion of design goals, or inspiration. Nothing to see here.
  • UncleEntity 7mo ago
    One of my experiments was to have Claude write a VM and then generate a verification harness (using a DSL) for it to ensure it was correct with the theory being the same bug would have to exist in the test suite, the static verification and the VM for it to sneak through. Found a few bugs in the verification library and some integer overflows in the VM then it became too much for my poor little laptop to run without cutting some important corners. It's not an abstract thing they can't do, you just have to tell them to.
• kreek 7mo ago
  This is the second "I built a programming language" post in a day, and if I post the one I'm building, we can have a three-day streak :D They thought AI meant personal software, but it also means personal programming languages! In all seriousness, this is great, and why not? As the post said, what once took months now takes weeks. You can experiment and see what works. For me, I started off building a web/API framework with certain correctness built in, and kept hitting the same wall: the guarantees I wanted (structured error handling, API contracts, making invalid states unrepresentable) really belonged at the language level, not bolted onto a framework. A few Claude Code sessions later, I had a spec, then a tree-sitter implementation, then a VM/JIT... something that, given my sandwich-generation-ness, I never would have done a few months ago.
  • bfivyvysj 7mo ago
    I should post number 4, last week I built a new lisp framework for LLMs as first class programmers. It compiles for go, python, and JS.
• deleted 7mo ago
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• sabinbir 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jc-myths 7mo ago
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• monksy 7mo ago
  This is something I've been thinking a bit about in the last few months. TL;DR I don't think an LLM can create a language from scratch better than what we have. To LLMs they operate on a hoffoman coded format. (Generalization). For them, you probably could communicate directly in the token representation and you'd be better off. The actual language understanding for the LLM is probably very inefficent. For human languages, I think there is opportunity here where you can build up intelligence on common reusable patterns and find places to optimize the usage, or break them down in a more cpu/readable way.
• lionkor 7mo ago
  If I wanted a vibe coded programming language, I would ask my LLM. Not go on HN.
  • OSaMaBiNLoGiN 7mo ago
    This
• wr639 7mo ago
  I am not very experienced but I was able to use Claude Code to build a test website, for my music, a test CRM, and me and my partner were planning to use it to make AI chatbots, when we were marketing these types of services last year. There were times when I found it frustrating due to my lack of experience. Someone mentioned token efficiency below and all the AI's seem to be designed to make you have to have it do things that you ask over and over again so it can use up as much tokens as it can before it gives you exactly what you need. Of course this may also be due to my lack of experience. I do have a friend with a great deal of experience who I go to for help and he even has issues with it at times.
• johnthescott 7mo ago
  spent a weekend with ai expert trying to get claude to grok a yacc grammar. claude confused the backus-naur of yacc itself with the grammar of my new language.