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SwellJoeyesterday at 8:29 PM2 repliesview on HN

The thing about Zig in these times is that it proves that software development as a craft is not dead or replaced by LLMs.

Even though I use LLMs every day, and have to admit they're remarkably good at many classes of problem, I don't want a programming language built by an LLM. Every line of code in a programming language, every decision, every trade off, matters. A vibe-designed/vibe-coded programming language would be a disaster. I don't know how else to put it, and I've never seen any model produce code that would convince me otherwise (even Fable, which is, in fact, a notable improvement over the prior best models). The models don't want anything. They don't have meaningful opinions. They don't know what comfortable vs. uncomfortable feels like in a language (or in a GUI or CLI interface at sufficient levels of complexity).

You can't get a language like Zig out of an LLM without simply copying Zig, and even then it would be a copy that is worse. (I mean, I'm assuming "copy with an LLM" means, "have an LLM write the spec and another build the language to the spec", not literally `cp` the source tree.)


Replies

ashiknstoday at 5:00 AM

> They don't know what comfortable vs. uncomfortable feels like in a language

This is mostly about human preferences right. If software is just taken as the end product, does it matter what "feels" good and doesn't?

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ChrisGreenHeuryesterday at 8:42 PM

Sure a human would write the language spec and the llm implement it

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