I ran Claude in a loop for 3 months, and it created a genz programming language
18 comments
·September 9, 2025rich_sasha
For completeness: how much does this cost? Asking as a dinosaur normie who has never paid for LLMs. Genuinely curious.
sethaurus
According to the author[0], the total spend was $14k USD.
[0]: https://x.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1965295152962097550
vidarh
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.
arunix
Recently, I wondered what would happen if two of these systems were set up doing mutual pair programming ...
pxndxx
Some of the keywords are quite sus, but I enjoyed the boolean literals being based/cringe.
EmptyCoffeeCup
Confused...
If "struct" is "squad"
Why is it "struct" in his example?
4b11b4
I consider this adjacent to AI psychosis...
juancn
I kinda like that `var` is `sus`.
BugsJustFindMe
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.
vidarh
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..
BugsJustFindMe
It produced...something, alright. Something that can be replaced by a very small shell script.
vidarh
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.
roxolotl
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.
vidarh
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.
null
philipp-gayret
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?
swader999
Bro, it's literally giving new language energy. Enjoy your semicolons boomer!
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