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Comment by hardwaregeek | Hacker News Reader

I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?

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The guy to watch here is https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone . He's rewritten SQLite in Rust with fixes, written his own Rust async engine with fixes that Tokio doesn't have, generated an insane number of tools for agentic orchestration (indexing of all sessions across all harnesses, on-demand skill storage, agent mail), and is currently building out agent orchestration terminal multiplexer stuff.

Source: been watching both these guys closely, as I've been building my own agent factory focused on security + learning: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc

Possible, yes. Easier? I tried to search for YouTube videos of people doing amazing things at blazing speed using Gas Town about a month ago, and couldn't find any. I for sure didn't want to spend hours reading and learning something that I don't know if it even works?

Does anyone have like, projects built using it? I couldn't find "look at the output" types of videos or articles or repos, only "look at the input" types of posts about it.

The 15 year old here used gas town to build a Simon game, but for learning Morse code. It's intended for phones. Still needs documentation touched up a bit.

Scroll the game panel up a bit, turn off the mute button and click start game. A Morse code letter will be played, key it back on the iambic keyer. Pad 1 is for dits. Pad 3 is for dahs. (Dots and dashes for those new to Morse code.) Get it right and the game plays that letter and another random letter back out to you. After successfully sending each sequence back to the game, you get a one letter longer sequence. Just like the handheld Simon game. Link's below

https://projecttoucans.com/pt-cwsimon

Forgot, use wired headphones or speaker. Bluetooth delay wreaks havoc adding delays to Morse code sidetones. Like trying to learn piano with delay between tapping key and hearing tune

> Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?

I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter.

(I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)

That’d also be an interesting data point! What’s the upper limits of vibe coding? Can you vibe code rust? What about an entire programming language toolchain? How about an ecosystem? Can you make a parallel npm?

That would be awesome to see! If there was some prize pool like $5,000 to build an operating system through vibe coding tools only and then people could stream themselves on twitch and you could have "sorts desk" type commentators who are collating all that together. I'd watch that and donate a hundred bucks.

I would much prefer vibe-coding to be used at the highest layers, not the substrate that we all depend on.

A lot of it seems to be porting open source projects to rust for other open source projects to consume.

This sounds like a great idea, but I think two questions need to be asked for this to make sense:

  1) Who is organizing/arbitrating?
  2) Who is paying for the tokens? Is there some sort of funding or prize?

I wish we could get to UBI so we don't have to ask those questions.

In all honesty, if you scoped this well, one of the big players in the LLM space could definitely host a big marketing event on this spin. Get together a bunch of well known industry folks, have them vibe code a working <thing> in a given time constraint, presentations and prizes, lots of marketing.

Crossing my fingers for an open source Chromium browser on Android with extensions enabled.

>Can we make an entirely new programming language?

This is trivial in a few hours with Claude Code

I am designing one, aimed at Claude Code and other AI Coding Agents, and getting the first version lex/parser/compiler was an afternoon project. It was initially a TypeScript toolchain generating TypeScript code.

I keep adding things here and there, a couple hours everyday. Then after about a week I decided to switch the toolchain from TypeScript to Rust, how much work? A 5 minute planning session and a ~20 minutes implementation phase.

Trivial stuff indeed.

LLMs have a chance to make anything they've been trained on, by outputting it verbatim (or with small modifications).

The question is the degree to which they can produce original things.

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