LLMs are generally more tolerant of tedium than humans, but they make mistakes more often on repetitive mechanical tasks. I've had Claude write PTX directly once, and Claude just wrote majority of it and commented something along the line of "repeat this block 7 more time with these minor changes" instead of writing them out, so the code didn't work.
So, no, replacing compilers with LLMs is probably a worse option than having them code a compiler/programming language.
Oct is the first programming language that I made with Codex. It started out as "Octave Modern" and was never intended to be a language for LLMs in the first place, but rather a teaching language that I've been thinking about for a decade because of my frustration with academic code and specifically reproducibility, with Python and Matlab in particular.
But it turns out the same design choices that was made to prevent bad patterns from academic code also made it pretty good for LLM coding: statically typed, immutable by default, GC'd with fast compile and runtime because it compiles to Go, along with features designed for scientific compute like SI units and builtin graphing etc.
But now it just took a life of its own, so it has extra features like templates/concepts, iterators, async/await, database query, build system for C/C++, SystemVerilog/WASM(WIP) codegen, LaTeX/pdf generation etc. None of them were features that were developed in isolation of "what an LLM agent might want to write" but to address a specific problem that I had encountered or to address specific failure modes that Codex/Claude actually had.
That's why I think Oct is probably one of the better languages for AI to write/generate, not because it was designed to be AI friendly in abstract, but that it's developed against how AI actually writes code, even though again, it is still very much a work in progress.
Thanks. The fun thing about the name "Oct" is how many dumb puns I can make with it. For example, the LaTeX/PDF generation functionality is called Oct-cument.
YuechenLi · · focus · HN ↗
LLMs are generally more tolerant of tedium than humans, but they make mistakes more often on repetitive mechanical tasks. I've had Claude write PTX directly once, and Claude just wrote majority of it and commented something along the line of "repeat this block 7 more time with these minor changes" instead of writing them out, so the code didn't work.
So, no, replacing compilers with LLMs is probably a worse option than having them code a compiler/programming language.
Plugging my own thing to use as example:
<a href="https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/oct" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/yuechen-li-dev/oct
Oct is the first programming language that I made with Codex. It started out as "Octave Modern" and was never intended to be a language for LLMs in the first place, but rather a teaching language that I've been thinking about for a decade because of my frustration with academic code and specifically reproducibility, with Python and Matlab in particular.
But it turns out the same design choices that was made to prevent bad patterns from academic code also made it pretty good for LLM coding: statically typed, immutable by default, GC'd with fast compile and runtime because it compiles to Go, along with features designed for scientific compute like SI units and builtin graphing etc.
But now it just took a life of its own, so it has extra features like templates/concepts, iterators, async/await, database query, build system for C/C++, SystemVerilog/WASM(WIP) codegen, LaTeX/pdf generation etc. None of them were features that were developed in isolation of "what an LLM agent might want to write" but to address a specific problem that I had encountered or to address specific failure modes that Codex/Claude actually had.
That's why I think Oct is probably one of the better languages for AI to write/generate, not because it was designed to be AI friendly in abstract, but that it's developed against how AI actually writes code, even though again, it is still very much a work in progress.
adastra22 · · focus · HN ↗
YuechenLi · · focus · HN ↗
I'm not proud of that pun.
arcanemachiner · · focus · HN ↗
adastra22 · · focus · HN ↗