[UncleEntity]

I've been messing with Claude pretty heavily the last week or so and found if I guide it in the right direction it (mostly) does the right thing.

I've been having it reproduce the lua peg parser thingie (plus utf-8 support)[0] from the paper they wrote about it while also using the 'musttail' interpreter pattern [1] just because that sounded like a good idea. Once I got over the fact that Claude is really bad at debugging and Deepseek, while much better at it, isn't very reliable due to 'server busy' timeouts things have been going swimmingly. While I don't do very much debugging once in a while they do get stuck trying the same things over and over so I have to step in and every so often it'll go crazy and come up with some over complicated solution where I have to ask "that's nice and all but wouldn't it have been easier to just update the index variable instead of rewriting the whole thing?" Claude also seems to like duplicating code instead of generating a helper function but I haven't had that argument with it yet.

So far we have a VM which passes all the tests (which was a battle), a Destination-Driven Code Generation (with additions and subtractions) based compiler implementing all the peg specific optimizations from the paper (which I haven't even starting debugging yet) and the start of a Python C-API module to tie it all together. Admittedly, the python module is all my doing because it's easier to use pybindgen than fight with the robots.

So, yeah, I'm just having fun getting the robots to write code I'm too lazy to write myself on a subject which has interested me for at least a decade. Once I get this working I plan on seeing how well they do with Copy-and-Patch Compilation[2] but don't really have high hopes on that.

[0] https://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/ [1] https://blog.reverberate.org/2021/04/21/musttail-efficient-i... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13127