3 posts tagged “geoffrey-huntley”
2025
I ran Claude in a loop for three months, and it created a genz programming language called cursed (via) Geoffrey Huntley vibe-coded an entirely new programming language using Claude:
The programming language is called "cursed". It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many times I've sworn at Claude.
Geoffrey's initial prompt:
Hey, can you make me a programming language like Golang but all the lexical keywords are swapped so they're Gen Z slang?
Then he pushed it to keep on iterating over a three month period.
Here's Hello World:
vibe main
yeet "vibez"
slay main() {
vibez.spill("Hello, World!")
}
And here's binary search, part of 17+ LeetCode problems that run as part of the test suite:
slay binary_search(nums normie[], target normie) normie {
sus left normie = 0
sus right normie = len(nums) - 1
bestie (left <= right) {
sus mid normie = left + (right - left) / 2
ready (nums[mid] == target) {
damn mid
}
ready (nums[mid] < target) {
left = mid + 1
} otherwise {
right = mid - 1
}
}
damn -1
}
This is a substantial project. The repository currently has 1,198 commits. It has both an interpreter mode and a compiler mode, and can compile programs to native binaries (via LLVM) for macOS, Linux and Windows.
It looks like it was mostly built using Claude running via Sourcegraph's Amp, which produces detailed commit messages. The commits include links to archived Amp sessions but sadly those don't appear to be publicly visible.
The first version was written in C, then Geoffrey had Claude port it to Rust and then Zig. His cost estimate:
Technically it costs about 5k usd to build your own compiler now because cursed was implemented first in c, then rust, now zig. So yeah, it’s not one compiler it’s three editions of it. For a total of $14k USD.
too many model context protocol servers and LLM allocations on the dance floor. Useful reminder from Geoffrey Huntley of the infrequently discussed significant token cost of using MCP.
Geoffrey estimate estimates that the usable context window something like Amp or Cursor is around 176,000 tokens - Claude 4's 200,000 minus around 24,000 for the system prompt for those tools.
Adding just the popular GitHub MCP defines 93 additional tools and swallows another 55,000 of those valuable tokens!
MCP enthusiasts will frequently add several more, leaving precious few tokens available for solving the actual task... and LLMs are known to perform worse the more irrelevant information has been stuffed into their prompts.
Thankfully, there is a much more token-efficient way of Interacting with many of these services: existing CLI tools.
If your coding agent can run terminal commands and you give it access to GitHub's gh tool it gains all of that functionality for a token cost close to zero - because every frontier LLM knows how to use that tool already.
I've had good experiences building small custom CLI tools specifically for Claude Code and Codex CLI to use. You can even tell them to run --help to learn how the tool, which works particularly well if your help text includes usage examples.
The future belongs to idea guys who can just do things. Geoffrey Huntley with a provocative take on AI-assisted programming:
I seriously can't see a path forward where the majority of software engineers are doing artisanal hand-crafted commits by as soon as the end of 2026.
He calls for companies to invest in high quality internal training and create space for employees to figure out these new tools:
It's hackathon (during business hours) once a month, every month time.
Geoffrey's concluding note resonates with me. LLMs are a gift to the fiercely curious and ambitious:
If you’re a high agency person, there’s never been a better time to be alive...