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I built a programming language using Claude Code

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Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#71

Post by aleksiy123 »

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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#72

Post by voxleone »

andsoitis wrote: post #2

> 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 inter…

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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#74

Post by mrsmrtss »

dwedge wrote: post #62

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 knowl…

I had the exact same thoughts reading it.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#75

Post by Zak »

imiric wrote: post #63
marssaxman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ta…

> 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.…

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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#76

Post by grumpyprole »

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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#77

Post by gf000 »

Insanity wrote: post #54
danielvaughn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Go is one of the most verbose mainstream programming languages, so that's a pretty terrible example.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#78

Post by exitb »

craigmart wrote: post #52
wavemode wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

”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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#79

Post by dboreham »

jcranmer wrote: post #45

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] } A…

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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#80

Post by thomasmg »

idiotsecant wrote: post #53
danielvaughn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think I remember seeing research right here on HN that terse languages don't actually help all that much

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.
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