upvote
One-shot, no, but there are a bunch of people pretty much solo-building their personal ideal language with AI and it's going quite well. You need to know just enough about language design to be dangerous, but you don't need to be a seasoned pro.

I'm doing it myself: https://zena-lang.dev/

reply
It seems like such a strange thing to do, building a language that you aren't going to write by hand. It's guaranteed to perform worse at higher cost, fill up a lot more of the context window, and burn a ton more reasoning tokens.

If you're using AI, a language with a large training set is going to win.

reply
> If you're using AI, a language with a large training set is going to win

Not necessarily? What if the training set contains an overwhelming amount if bad code written by neophytes? I imagine Python quality by the LLM suffers from this, for example.

What if the language has extremely confusing syntax constructs (like early php) or bad or no conventions (suppose the standard library has somecollection.put(key, value) sometimes and othercollection.put(value, key) other times), and individual code authors just pick what they want adhoc

Large training set ain't gonna save you.

reply
There's a lot of RL that goes into this, you're not just training on bad code. Python is one of the programming languages that LLMs consistently perform best at.
reply
I guess it depends on whether you will write everything in an AI assisted fashion or not. There's benefits to languages that are quick and easy to read by the author even if the LLM is doing the writing, because most code still benefits from human review above and beyond the review that agents provide. Language popularity certainly helps but it seems like for moderately popular languages [1] the cost you pay for a lack of popularity is quite modest.

[1]: https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/

reply
A language you just created isn't going to be moderately popular, so it's just going to put you at a disadvantage -- and you're not even going to be writing in it, so why the self-kneecapping?
reply
I mean what does "put you at a disadvantage" even mean concretely? To use a less popular language, it means you need to load up context related to the semantics of your language, load context on how to invoke tools to make sure the syntax with your language is correct, load up context related to each tool call you make (which will be more numerous in a niche language), and load up context on architectural decisions that might be specific to your language. All of this is simply a token cost. By forcing a model to load an initial amount of context per harness turn you also effectively shorten the max context window beyond which the model becomes stupid (which itself is much shorter than the max context length.)

Obviously it's not like people are specifically trimming each and every prompt they give a model to tokenmax their models to get the best output / input prompt, we instead live in a spectrum of how many tokens of input and context we're willing to provide to a model to make progress. If the cost of those tokens is low enough for the problem domain you're working in, then it's fine. For some the readability of a personal language may outstrip any of the token costs that one needs to pay to use it. Alternatively maybe you want something like an array language (J, K, APL, etc) which allows array programming and optimizations that conventional PLs just can't do. Maybe you want your language to compile to a target that is highly portable. There's actually a lot of stuff out there that previously wasn't feasible but with LLMs-as-force-multiplier absolutely is.

I also suspect the space is a continuum. There may be pareto optimal points, such as DSLs built atop languages, that are both highly readable but also fairly token efficient.

reply
It's both a token cost and a performance cost; there's only so much that documentation can do, compared to a ton of RL on top of millions of lines of examples. The space is a continuum, but the more you stray from the trained path the higher the cost you pay.
reply
I don't think those assertions about AI development necessarily hold. And I think it'd be a depressing future if we can't ever have anything new or better that wasn't popular in the training set as of November 2025.

I wrote about some of my thoughts with Zena and AI here: https://zena-lang.dev/blog/2026/09/languages-for-the-ai-era/

reply
Yes, we're building a sad world. I'm glad you noticed. Until we get LLMs with online learning, training data will dominate.
reply
This assumes the goal is to create a productive language.

When I design my own languages (I have written several, all terrible!) it's typically to learn about language design.

reply
deleted
reply
Been thinking about doing this myself (did some PL in grad school but it's been a long time), but I find myself wanting to reach for a Scheme (using macros to grow the language I want) and customize it or build something atop Janet.

Curious why you wanted a more ML / Rust / Scala inspired syntax. (Personal preference here is totally valid btw, just curious.)

reply
The syntax is TypeScript inspired because I like it and my bet is that the familiarity helps human and AI coders learn the language.
reply
Claude can’t one-shot a C compiler.

None of these systems can. They need enormous training. They need alignment and reinforcement. They need harnesses. And most importantly they need a human that knows how to write and develop a C compiler.

The ISO specifications are not sufficient. Neither are the System V guidelines. Not even spec tests and compcert.

reply
You're not going to one-shot it, but over the course of a couple of months of evenings you could come up with something usable/interesting if you manage the LLM well.
reply
Nobody is one-shotting big projects. Even humans can't do that.
reply
Fabrice Bellard might be an exception.
reply