Creator here. This started as a dumb question while using Claude Code: "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?"

40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up. So I spent some weekends asking: what would an intermediate language look like if we stopped pretending humans are the authors?

NERD is the experiment.

Bootstrap compiler works, compiles to native via LLVM. It's rough, probably wrong in interesting ways, but it runs. Could be a terrible idea. Could be onto something. Either way, it was a fun rabbit hole.

Contributors welcome if this seems interesting to you - early stage, lots to figure out: https://github.com/Nerd-Lang/nerd-lang-core

Happy to chat about design decisions or argue about whether this makes any sense at all.

▲

wmoxam 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 40% of code is now machine-written

How did you arrive at that number?

▲

gnanagurusrgs 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ran a simple test with the examples you find in the project. Will publish those benchmarks.. actually that makes me think, I should probably do a public test suite showing the results. :)

	▲	wmoxam 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, now I'm even more confused. 40% of what code is machine written?

▲

andrepd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The same way LLMs arrive at things? :)

▲

wrs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Now that we know code is a killer app for LLMs, why would we keep tokenizing code as if it were human language? I would expect someone's fixing their tokenizer to densify existing code patterns for upcoming training runs (and make them more semantically aligned).

▲

wilsonnb3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "Why is Claude writing TypeScript I'm supposed to read?" 40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up.

How much of the code is read by humans, though? I think using languages that LLMs work well with, like TS or Python, makes a lot of sense but the chosen language still needs to be readable by humans.

▲

sublinear 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Why do people keep saying LLMs work well with high level scripting languages?

I've never had a good result. Just tons of silent bugs that are obvious those experienced with Python, JS/TS, etc. and subtle to everyone else.

▲

alienbaby 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps they are being more successful in their use of llm's than you are?

▲

sublinear 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes "success" as they understand it, and they are always so smug while refusing to show or even discuss the code the LLM produced.

A poor craftsman may blame his tools, but some tools really are the wrong ones for the job.

	▲	raddan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I keep having this nagging suspicion that the biggest AI boosters just aren’t very good programmers. Maybe they cannot see all the subtle bugs. I’m not an amazing coder but I frequently have “wait, stop!” moments when generating code with an LLM.

▲

tyre 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love the idea! I’m glad you did this.

What about something like clojure? It’s already pretty succinct and Claude knows it quite well.

Plus there are heavily documented libraries that it knows how to use and are in its training data.

▲

liqilin1567 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like the idea, but this is going be a very very long journey to develop a completely new machine-friendly language like this while LLMs still have many limitations now.

▲

kevml 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s an interesting thought experiment! My first questions boil down to the security and auditability of the code. How easy is it for a human to comprehend the code?

	▲	gnanagurusrgs 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is still very visible, auditable, and one of the features I'm hoping to add is a more visual layer that shows the nook and corners of the code, coming up soon. But regardless, the plain code itself is readable and visible, but it's not as friendly as the other languages for humans.