FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

Yes! I'm currently using copilot + antigravity to implement a language with ergonomic syntax and semantics that lowers cleanly to machine code targeting multiple platforms, with a focus on safety, determinism, auditability and fail-fast bugs. It's more work than I thought but the LLMs are very capable.

I was dreaming of a JS to machine code, but then thought, why not just start from scratch and have what I want? It's a lot of fun.

What's the point of making something like this if you don't get to deeply understand what your doing?

What's the point of owning a car if you don't build it by hand yourself?

Anyway, all it will do is stop you being able to run as well as you used to be able to do when you had to go everywhere on foot.

What is the point of car that on Mondays changes colour to blue and on each first Friday of the year explodes?

If neither you not anyone else can fix it, without more cost than making a proper one?

Code review exists.

Proper code review takes as long as writing the damn thing in the first place and is infinitely more boring. And you still miss things that would have been obvious while writing.

In this special case, you'd have to reverse engineer the grammar from the parser, calculate first/follow sets and then see if the grammar even is what you intended it to be.

Author did review the (also generated) tests, which as long as they're comprehensive enough for his purposes, all pass and coverage is very high, means things work well enough. Attempting to manually edit that code is a whole other thing though.

That argument might work for certain kinds of applications (none I'd like to use, though), but for a programming language, nope.

I am using LLMs to speed up coding as well, but you have to be super vigilant, and do it in a very modular way.

They literally just made it to do AoC challenges, and shared it for fun (and publicity).