FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

I think it would be super interesting to see how the LLM handles extending/modifying the code it has written. Ie. adding/removing features, in order to simulate the life cycle of a normal software project. After all, LLM-produced code would only be of limited use if it’s worse at adding new features than humans are.

As I understand, this would require somehow “saving the state” of the LLM, as it exists after the last prompt — since I don’t think the LLM can arrive at the same state by just being fed the code it has written.

I described my experience using Claude Code Web to vibe-code a language interpreter here [0], with a link to the closed PRs [1].

As it turns out, you don't really need to "save the state"; with decent-enough code and documentation (both of which the LLM can write), it can figure out what needs to be done and go from there. This is obviously not perfect - and a human developer with a working memory could get to the problem faster - but its reorientation process is fast enough that you generally don't have to worry about it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46005813 [1]: https://github.com/philpax/perchance-interpreter/pulls?q=is%...

They are very good at understanding current code and its architecture so no need to save state. In any case, it is good to explicitly ask them to generate proper comments for their architectural decisions and to keep updated AGENT.md file

Claude can just poke around the codebase as-is. You can also have it synthesize a README and update that as it goes.

I've found it perfectly capable of adding eg new entities and forms to existing CRUD apps.