What's the point of making something like this if you don't get to deeply understand what your doing?

I want something I can use, and something useful. It's not just a learning exercise. I get to understand it by following along.

What's the point of owning a car if you don't build it by hand yourself?

Anyway, all it will do is stop you being able to run as well as you used to be able to do when you had to go everywhere on foot.

How deep do you need to know?

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

At least for me that fits. I have quite enough graduate-level knowledge of physics, math, and computer science to rarely be stumped by a research paper or anything an LLM spits out. That may get me scorn from those tested on those subjects. Yet, I'm still an effective ignoramus.

I have made a lot of things using LLMs and I fully understood everything. It is doable.

If they go far enough with it they will be forced to understand it deeply. The LLM provides more leverage at the beginning because this project is a final exam for a first semester undergrad PL course, therefore there are a billion examples of “vaguely Java/Python/C imperative language with objects and functions” to train the LLM on.

Ultimately though, the LLM is going to become less useful as the language grows past its capabilities. If the language author doesn’t have a sufficient map of the language and a solid plan at that point, it will be the blind leading the blind. Which is how most lang dev goes so it should all work out.