If the agent is at least reasonably good at your language, the errors that are getting caught at compile time in a language with reasonably expressive types like Swift should be actually catching and eliminating bugs without having the run anything. It seems like the ceiling of how long an iteration takes would be lower, but the floor would be a lot higher, and then you're making a bet that the number of iterations needed won't be so high that it takes more time overall to get things working, which doesn't strike me as obviously true (and that's not getting into how fast the final product will be when the agent is finished, although both Lua and Swift seem like they're most heavily used in domains where you don't really have an alternative choice, so it's not easy to really compare these anyhow)

> In fact, I'd say it's more "fun" watching an agent work on something in Lua as the iteration loop is tighter: more restarts, more feedback, instant running. When I deal with typed languages (in my case, Swift) the feedback loop is dragged-out by the compile time which makes the whole process feel slower

Ideally you'd want both. In this case though, if you're paying per token you'd prefer the typed language, since compiler invocations are presumably less expensive. So the interactive compilation strategy where it has to continually consume compiler output and run inference on it is going to be more expensive than letting the compiler do what it's good at. (I wonder at what point that math would invert and what would happen if it did.)

That's why something like Teal is perfect for AI, to answer the original question of "why this when there's AI now?" You'd want to add types to Lua to check what you can beforehand precisely because it helps give you the best of both worlds.