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I built a programming language using Claude Code

ankursethi.com

31–40 of 194 posts

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#31
post #9

Next you can let Claude play your video games for you as well. Gads we are a voyeuristic society aren’t we.

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!

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#32
post #11

> 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.

I'm imagining the amount of energy required to power the datacenter so that we can produce isEven() utility methods.

we need a caching layer

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#34
post #31
post #9

Next you can let Claude play your video games for you as well. Gads we are a voyeuristic society aren’t we.

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!

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

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#35

> 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…

> 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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#36

> 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…

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…

> 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.

That's assuming that your new, very unknown language gets slurped up in the next training session which seems unlikely. Couldn't you use RAG or have an LLM read the docs for your language?

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#37

> 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…

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…

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.

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#38

Now anyone can be a Larry Wall, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

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).

Re: I built a programming language using Claude Code

#40
post #3

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!

> 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.

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.

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