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I built a programming language using Claude Code

ankursethi.com

191–194 of 194 posts

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#191

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…

> 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. I think this is right. Strategically, do you have a mental model of some key elements such a new programming language should exhibit? I'm curious about which existing programming languages…

I don't have any ideas quite that far-reaching, but it has struck me that agentic programmers seem to struggle with performance issues. What if a language had something like a type system for expressing constraints on computational complexity and space/time tradeoffs?

My own pet idea is a DSL for declaring tiny in-memory databases, to be used inside a Rust program. Instead of writing a bunch of code with loops and Vec, HashMap, HashSet, etc, what if you could declare your tables, declare your queries, and let a little compiler produce an efficient implementation, expressed in terms of structs and iterators?

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#194
post #172
post #93

> 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 p…

> 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.

This post (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.

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