Hacker News Reader

Testing the limits of vibe coding. Created a programming language 100% via prompting a o4-mini-high, but did carefully review the code. https://github.com/ryanmcdermott/spress

View on HN

Sounds interesting. How much manual labour you had to do? Or was the code completely vibe coded and not edited?

It took about 10 hours. Arguably would have taken me 100 to do it manually but likely would have fewer bugs, there’s a few I’m aware of, but I bet there are many.

I started with a basic syntax for expressions and specified a lot up front such as it being a bytecode interpreter and using a recursive descent parser.

I found building it up feature by feature to be much more effective than one shotting an entire feature rich language. Still there was a lot of back and forth.

Really cool!

Only 1 commit :/ Would love to see the prompts and how you iterated on this

Great point. I regret not being more systematic about this. I have tried on most popular models since gpt 3.5 launched, but it’s all been very ad hoc with the same general approach of building up a language feature by feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com