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We put a coding agent in a while loop

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Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#7
Nice. Check out https://ghuntley.com/ralph to learn more about Ralph. It's currently building a Gen-Z esoteric programming language and porting the standard library from Go to the Cursed programming language. The compiler is working, I'm just finishing up the touches of the standard library before launching.

The language is called Cursed.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#9
I’ve done a few ports like this with Claude Code (but not with a while loop) and it did work amazingly well. The original codebase had a good test suite, so I had it port the test suite first, and gave it some code style guidance up front. Then the agent did remarkably well at doing a straight port from one imperative language to another. Then there’s some purely human work to get it really done — 80-90% done sounds about right.

Re: We put a coding agent in a while loop

#10
There's a lot of "it kind of worked" in here.

If we actually want stuff that works, we need to come up with a new process. If we get "almost" good code from a single invocation, you just going to get a lot of almost good code from a loop. What we likely need is a Cucumberesque format with example tables for requirements that we can distill an AI to use. It will build the tests and then build the code to to pass the tests.

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