(Seasoned) developers are using AI to build programming languages at speeds that would've been unthinkable a few years ago.
The facts:
- Bernard Lambeau built Elo (parser, type system, three compilers, stdlib, CLI, docs) in ~24 hours with Claude
- Steve Klabnik (13-year Rust veteran, co-author of "The Rust Programming Language") wrote 70,000 lines of code for a new language in two weeks.
- Geoffrey Huntley created Cursed, a language with Gen-Z syntax where functions are declared with slay and booleans are based/cringe.
- Ola Prøis built Ferrite, a text editor with ~800 GitHub stars, with 100% AI-generated code
Key patterns that emerged:
- All four developers have decades of combined experience
- Lambeau has a PhD and 30 years of programming under his belt
- A CodeRabbit study found AI-generated code has 1.7x more issues than human-written code
- The AI compressed the typing, not the thinking
For comparison, Rust took 9 years from conception to 1.0. Go took 2 years with a Google team.
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