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> every AI coding bot will learn your new language as a matter of course after its next update includes the contents of your website. How will it "learn" anyth

by imiric 7mo ago

> every AI coding bot will learn your new language as a matter of course after its next update includes the contents of your website. How will it "learn" anything if the only available training data is on a single website? LLMs struggle with following instructions when their training set is massive. The idea that they will be able to produce working software from just a language spec and a few examples is delusional. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how these tools work. They don't understand anything. They generate patterns based on probabilities and fine tuning. Without massive amounts of data to skew the output towards a potentially correct result they're not much more useful than a lookup table.

Zak 7mo ago
They don't understand anything, but they sure can repeat a pattern. I'm using Claude Code to work on something involving a declarative UI DSL that wraps a very imperative API. Its first pass at adding a new component required imperative management of that component's state. Without that implementation in context, I told Claude the imperative pattern "sucks" and asked for an improvement just to see how far that would get me. A human developer familiar with the codebase would easily understand the problem and add some basic state management to the DSL's support for that component. I won't pretend Claude understood, but it matched the pattern and generated the result I wanted. This does suggest to me that a language spec and a handful of samples is enough to get it to produce useful results.
dmd 7mo ago
It's wild to me the disconnect between people who actually use these tools every day and people who don't. I have done exactly the above with great success. I work with a weird proprietary esolang sometimes that I like, and the only documentation - or code - that exists for it is on my computer. I load that documentation in, and it works just fine and writes pretty decent code in my esolang. "But that can't possibly work [based on my misunderstanding of how LLMs work]!" you say. Well, it does, so clearly you misunderstand how they work.
- ModernMech 7mo ago
  The reason it works so well is that everyone’s “personal unique language” really isn’t all that different from what’s been proposed before, and any semantic differences are probably not novel. If you make your language C + transactional memory, the LLM probably has enough information about both to reason about your code without having to be trained on a billion lines. Probably if you’re trying to be esoteric and arcane then yeah, you might have trouble, but that’s not normally how languages evolve.
  - dmd 7mo ago
    No, mine's a esoteric declarative data description/transform language. It's pretty damn weird.
    - wizzwizz4 7mo ago
      You may underestimate the weirdness of existing declarative data transformation languages. On a scale of 1 to 10, XSLT is about a 2 or 3.
      - dmd 7mo ago
        Mine's a weird, bad copy of Ab Initio's DML. https://www.google.com/search?q=ab+initio+dml+language https://www.google.com/search?q=ab+initio+dml+language
        ModernMech 7mo ago
        When you say "weird" you mean "different from mainstream languages", but the exact way in which your language is weird (declarative data description/transformation) is probably exactly where languages will be going in the future because of how well-suited they are for LLM reading and writing. Those languages expose the structure of the computation directly such as data shapes and the relationships that transform them, rather than burying intent inside control flow. With more explicit types and dataflow information, the model doesn't need to simulate execution (something LLMs are particularly bad at) as much as recognize and extend a transformation graph (something LLMs are particularly good at). So it's probably just that your particularly weird language is particularly well-adapted to LLM technology.

by imiric 7mo ago

Zak 7mo ago

They don't understand anything, but they sure can repeat a pattern. I'm using Claude Code to work on something involving a declarative UI DSL that wraps a very imperative API. Its first pass at adding a new component required imperative management of that component's state. Without that implementation in context, I told Claude the imperative pattern "sucks" and asked for an improvement just to see how far that would get me. A human developer familiar with the codebase would easily understand the problem and add some basic state management to the DSL's support for that component. I won't pretend Claude understood, but it matched the pattern and generated the result I wanted. This does suggest to me that a language spec and a handful of samples is enough to get it to produce useful results.

dmd 7mo ago

It's wild to me the disconnect between people who actually use these tools every day and people who don't. I have done exactly the above with great success. I work with a weird proprietary esolang sometimes that I like, and the only documentation - or code - that exists for it is on my computer. I load that documentation in, and it works just fine and writes pretty decent code in my esolang. "But that can't possibly work [based on my misunderstanding of how LLMs work]!" you say. Well, it does, so clearly you misunderstand how they work.

ModernMech 7mo ago
The reason it works so well is that everyone’s “personal unique language” really isn’t all that different from what’s been proposed before, and any semantic differences are probably not novel. If you make your language C + transactional memory, the LLM probably has enough information about both to reason about your code without having to be trained on a billion lines. Probably if you’re trying to be esoteric and arcane then yeah, you might have trouble, but that’s not normally how languages evolve.
- dmd 7mo ago
  No, mine's a esoteric declarative data description/transform language. It's pretty damn weird.
  - wizzwizz4 7mo ago
    You may underestimate the weirdness of existing declarative data transformation languages. On a scale of 1 to 10, XSLT is about a 2 or 3.
    - dmd 7mo ago
      Mine's a weird, bad copy of Ab Initio's DML. https://www.google.com/search?q=ab+initio+dml+language https://www.google.com/search?q=ab+initio+dml+language
      - ModernMech 7mo ago
        When you say "weird" you mean "different from mainstream languages", but the exact way in which your language is weird (declarative data description/transformation) is probably exactly where languages will be going in the future because of how well-suited they are for LLM reading and writing. Those languages expose the structure of the computation directly such as data shapes and the relationships that transform them, rather than burying intent inside control flow. With more explicit types and dataflow information, the model doesn't need to simulate execution (something LLMs are particularly bad at) as much as recognize and extend a transformation graph (something LLMs are particularly good at). So it's probably just that your particularly weird language is particularly well-adapted to LLM technology.