Beast instead of for-loop: AI develops programming language in Gen-Z slang
A developer from Australia ran Claude Code in a continuous loop for three months to develop a GenZ compiler. He calls the result Cursed.
Screenshot of the Cursed programming language website
(Image: cursed-lang.org)
Damn, that's cringe: Australian Geoffrey Huntley let the programming AI Claude Code from Anthropic run in a continuous loop for three months to design his own programming language in the style of the popular colloquial language of Generation Z. And why? And why? Well, because he can, as he explains in a blog post.
He writes that he was simply attracted by the possibility of using generative AI to realize his dream of creating his own compiler. The whole thing was then also a learning experiment. The AI was left to further improve the language itself. He has even made the result available for download on his website. The name of the programming language: Cursed.
Community decides on continuation
The compiler has two modes. It can be used as an interpreter or as a compiler and create binary files for macOS, Linux, and Windows. There are also semi-finished extensions for the VSCode, Emacs, and Vim editors. If you would like to take a look at the development process, you can find corresponding videos on YouTube.
In terms of language, you can imagine that familiar terms such as for or case will be replaced by words that are popular in Gen Z, such as bestie or mood. There is no roadmap for further development; the community should decide on this.
The cost of the experiment
The original prompt was, “Hey, can you create me a programming language like Golang, but with all the lexical keywords swapped out so that they correspond to Generation Z slang?”
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However, if you want to follow Huntley's example, you should have the necessary change ready. His compiler costs around 5,000 US dollars, he writes in a post on X. In fact, at 14,000 US dollars, he had to invest almost three times as much, as Cursed was first developed in C, then in Rust, and now in Zig. But now there are also three editions of the compiler. And in the end, it's only a fourteenth of the salary of a developer in San Francisco, he jokes.
(mki)
