I ran Claude in a loop for 3 months, and it created a genz programming language | Hacker News Reader

I ran Claude in a loop for 3 months, and it created a genz programming language

ghuntley.com

20 pointsimasl4219 comments

This is the software equivalent of purchasing a 3d printing without goals and printing all those useless toys that will be used once and forgotten

For completeness: how much does this cost? Asking as a dinosaur normie who has never paid for LLMs. Genuinely curious.

According to the author[0], the total spend was $14k USD.

[0]: https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1965295152962097550

3 versions... Yikes. But the output, while messy, is still impressive, and makes me wonder how much you could trim that down by giving more comprehensive instructions.

Recently, I wondered what would happen if two of these systems were set up doing mutual pair programming ...

You can test that out. Ollama does allow you to run open source models at home. I've been playing around with a bit lately and have been really enjoying it.

On my to do list is two models running at once and building a middle layer for them to interact.

One of my fun experiments recently has been putting ChatGPT in conversation mode when I go for a walk. I recently had a 45 minute conversation where "we" fleshed out a multi-agent platform. I think a key is that you need to give each agent an "inner conversation" and criteria for when output from it gets copied to the other agents and the main chat, coupled with a process to regularly compact. I intend to set up a test system I want to run continuously, and given I enjoy working on compilers maybe I'll see how much cheaper you can do something like what OP did if you orchestrator a few agents with domain knowledge in specific areas.

I think I'd want to test a state of the art model, but it'd be fascinating to see how far you can get with Ollama as well - especially whether you can compensate for less smarts by just giving it far more runtime than I could afford with e.g. Claude.

Some of the keywords are quite sus, but I enjoyed the boolean literals being based/cringe.

I'm sorry but substituting keywords does not make a new language.

You waited 3 months for a list of arbitrarily selected find/replace terms.

> how much did this cost - 1/4th of a San Francisco software engineer's monthly salary

Man, I really hope this isn't true. Spending 1/4 of an SF software engineer's monthly salary to set the planet on fire for a list of arbitrary and phenomenally-googleable find/replace terms demonstrates only bad qualities.

Bro, it's literally giving new language energy. Enjoy your semicolons boomer!

Yea I’d expect Claude to be able to one shot this and I’m pretty pessimistic about the capability of these tools. I’m just so bewildered by posts like this.

One-shot a regexp, sure. One-shot a full compiler, not a chance.

Check out the repository - it has a full compiler that produces binaries, and a bunch of additional tooling. Doing that, even if he'd asked for a compiler for an existing language with no changes, is impressive.

Well, that was the author's intent. The prompt was:

> Hey, can you make me a programming language like Golang but all the lexical keywords are swapped so they're Gen Z slang?

The language is the least interesting part of this. What is interesting is if it was truly built with a simple loop and without manual involvement to produce a working compiler (albeit with fairly cursed code... 5.5kloc for a parser for a grammar that appears this simple is not great)

Sadly, the linked page glosses over the specifics of the setup and instead focused on the less interesting parts..

It produced...something, alright. Something that can be replaced by a very small shell script.

And that is entirely irrelevant, as the purpose was to produce a compiler.

As an experiment this is amazing in terms of telling us a lot about how capable these tools are. Most developers would not be capable of producing a working compiler and the associated tooling in this kind of timeframe.

Confused...

If "struct" is "squad"

Why is it "struct" in his example?

I consider this adjacent to AI psychosis...

I kinda like that `var` is `sus`.

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