I think this makes two incorrect assumptions:<p>1. That a human, even a brilliant human with a lot of experience, can sit down and one-shot a language spec for a new language that is actually good.<p>2. That an agent can produce code that is good enough for a programming language that intends to last for decades without exhaustive human review.<p>We might advance to the point where 2 is true, we're not there yet. We'll never make a better human that can one-shot a good programming language. It takes iteration, with a human in the loop. Zig has taken ten years to get to this point, and is still occasionally experiencing major refactors.<p>If you want to argue an LLM could potentially accelerate development by some amount, I would agree with you. How much it could accelerate it is debatable. And, I understand why the Zig folks have decided not to accelerate in that way. There is a cost to it. You lose the junior programmer pipeline, as your "good first bug" list gets chewed up by people using LLMs. You still have to exhaustively review the code for a critical path like a compiler and AI code is hard to review; it doesn't have a point to it. The model doesn't want anything, so it's not always clear where it's going. Code without clear intention, like prose without clear intention, is hard to read and hard to review. It's verbose and often makes weird assumptions.<p>If I, for some reason, needed to implement a tiny DSL for something, I would 100% do it with an LLM. If I, for some reason, were tasked with building the best programming language to replace C, I would not hand it to an LLM (though I would get help from an LLM, because I don't know how to build a programming language beyond the tiniest toy interpreter or compiler, I'd need to read and understand every line of code, and use it daily, for it to turn out good).