alt Hacker NewsNot my experience, honestly. With a good code base for it to explore and good tooling, and a really good prompt I've had excellent results with frankly quite obscure things, including homegrown languages.
As others said, the key is feedback and prompting. In a model with long context, it'll figure it out.
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Yeah, I've had Claude work on my buggy, incomplete Ruby compiler written (mostly) in Ruby, which uses an s-expression like syntax with a custom "mini language" to implement low-level features that can't be done (or is impractical to do) in pure Ruby, and it only had minor problems with the s-expression language that was mostly fixed with a handful of lines in CLAUDE.md (and were, frankly, mostly my fault for making the language itself somewhat inconsistent) and e.g. when it write a bigint implementation, I had to "tell it off" for too readily resorting to the s-expression syntax since it seemed to "prefer it" over writing high-level code in Ruby.
But isn't this inefficient since the agent has to "bootstrap" its knowledge of the new language every time it's context window is reset?