I built a programming language that LLMs can't use

"Writing code is probably something LLMs have excelled at the most. But how much of their ability to write code is due to their understanding of it vs. just them recalling code snippets which were present in their training dataset or their context window?"

This makes me think mostly about how humans work.

Programming is to humans like "speaking a language". You have ideas for what to achieve and express, and if you are a proficient programmer then outputting those thoughts in a programming language is second nature.

Programming (like most things humans learn) takes practice. It is NOT enough to simply read a specification and then you know how to code (except for transferring skills between similar languages). You repeat, make mistakes, and learn from them.

I would be tempted to say that humans definitely "repeat snippets from their training dataset". We mainly recall and express from our training/experiences. Creativity is mostly recombination of things already seen.

Related: the Darmok programming language: https://github.com/kevinselwyn/darmok

  Temba, his arms wide stdio
  
  Darmok on the ocean
      Kira at Bashi "Hello, World!\n"

      Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra 0
  Darmok and Jalad on the ocean

I wonder if another approach would be to map the language syntax onto some banned/censored LLM topic(s) such that programs end up as "readable" instructions for topics the LLM refuses to read and/or write, like producing napalm, nukes, bioweapons, etc. Doesn't have to be factually correct instructions, the terminology itself is enough to shortcircuit most LLMs.

(Inspired by recent malware including bioweapon instructions in the source code as a way to shut down LLM-based analysis.)

Security by obscurity is not security at all.

You're attempting to use a few little gotchas against LLMs that only make sense if you're looking at it one dimensionally as a standard execution flow. AI is not limited by that. Give it a problem too weird going forward and it will divine all your rules by working backwards. Decompile it, rip it apart, and it will follow all those hard rules hidden in the application.

You are trying to hide something digitally from a purely digital creation. This is not a recipe for success.

Wouldn't an LLM just write a python script to convert an intermediate language without the triggering phrases and letter counting.

If found that stack languages are a massive weak spot for LLMs. It requires accurate tracking of what is on the stack and for some reason that doesn't really work. So even the best models end up making the same basic mistakes over and over again.

Wonder how this could be used for communication and captchas? Could be a really expandable approach to determining "probability of bot" for a lot of internal use cases in companies that might involve requesting access to specific resources only meant for humans.

Interesting, reminds me of the Stroop test where people have to say what color a word is written in, except the word is "red" and the color is blue.

I wonder if a sufficiently smart LLM would recognize the difficulty and build a preprocessor that would let it mostly work in a normal syntax.

Where's the human baseline for the benchmarks?

Also, you said:

> The best performing model scores a 66.8. So does this prove LLMs can “understand” the code? I would argue that the answer to this is “no”.

How did you reach that conclusion?

I guess my question is whether it increases the difficulty more for LLMs or humans.

May I ask what the motivation behind KilllSwitch is? Out of curiosity, I decided to test your claims and asked Claude to build a program in Go and Claude Skill that is able to decompile (from) and compile (to) KS programs along with a Claude Skill that doesn't trip it up. It all works™ -- All your example programs.

So, whilst I _think_ you've built a very clever interpreter, I don't think you can get around the fact that someone (like me) could just build around the noise you've created anyway.

Right?

Now that it has a nice webpage the describes the obfuscation technics, it is basically cracked at this point to next-gen models.