Comment by nvme0n1p1
7 hours ago
> Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?
Sounds like a fun little project, have a bunch of AI pushers fork Zig and see if they can do a better job. I want to see results, not snarky HN comments. After all this progress, ChatGPT should be able to one-shot a better language since AI is so good now... right?
One-shot, no, but there are a bunch of people pretty much solo-building their personal ideal language with AI and it's going quite well. You need to know just enough about language design to be dangerous, but you don't need to be a seasoned pro.
I'm doing it myself: https://zena-lang.dev/
It seems like such a strange thing to do, building a language that you aren't going to write by hand. It's guaranteed to perform worse at higher cost, fill up a lot more of the context window, and burn a ton more reasoning tokens.
If you're using AI, a language with a large training set is going to win.
> If you're using AI, a language with a large training set is going to win
Not necessarily? What if the training set contains an overwhelming amount if bad code written by neophytes? I imagine Python quality by the LLM suffers from this, for example.
What if the language has extremely confusing syntax constructs (like early php) or bad or no conventions (suppose the standard library has somecollection.put(key, value) sometimes and othercollection.put(value, key) other times), and individual code authors just pick what they want adhoc
Large training set ain't gonna save you.
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I guess it depends on whether you will write everything in an AI assisted fashion or not. There's benefits to languages that are quick and easy to read by the author even if the LLM is doing the writing, because most code still benefits from human review above and beyond the review that agents provide. Language popularity certainly helps but it seems like for moderately popular languages [1] the cost you pay for a lack of popularity is quite modest.
[1]: https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/
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I don't think those assertions about AI development necessarily hold. And I think it'd be a depressing future if we can't ever have anything new or better that wasn't popular in the training set as of November 2025.
I wrote about some of my thoughts with Zena and AI here: https://zena-lang.dev/blog/2026/09/languages-for-the-ai-era/
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This assumes the goal is to create a productive language.
When I design my own languages (I have written several, all terrible!) it's typically to learn about language design.
Been thinking about doing this myself (did some PL in grad school but it's been a long time), but I find myself wanting to reach for a Scheme (using macros to grow the language I want) and customize it or build something atop Janet.
Curious why you wanted a more ML / Rust / Scala inspired syntax. (Personal preference here is totally valid btw, just curious.)
The syntax is TypeScript inspired because I like it and my bet is that the familiarity helps human and AI coders learn the language.
Claude can’t one-shot a C compiler.
None of these systems can. They need enormous training. They need alignment and reinforcement. They need harnesses. And most importantly they need a human that knows how to write and develop a C compiler.
The ISO specifications are not sufficient. Neither are the System V guidelines. Not even spec tests and compcert.
You're not going to one-shot it, but over the course of a couple of months of evenings you could come up with something usable/interesting if you manage the LLM well.
Nobody is one-shotting big projects. Even humans can't do that.
Fabrice Bellard might be an exception.