program_whiz

this suffers from the same prisoner's dilemma we already see at play. Any player can defect and in theory capture a "trillion dollar market". Once they IPO, then their service is to maximize (short term) shareholder value. Saying "we reject all the billions in recurring subscription revenue because we are hoping all AI providers will do the same, therefore creating a moat" isn't going to go over well.

Yeah I wrote some metaprogramming stuff, but to me it felt like run a python script and use python AST to manip the program. Its basically just a program that runs and has hooks into the compiler steps and the code.

This left me feeling like "I wish I had decorators and annotations" from other languages, not a way to write arbitrary compile-time code. The use case for that is so rare, and kludgy, that I don't think its worth it.

Now it did shine with basic hygenic macros, which felt useful and solid. Its basically how C macros should have been done originally (a function that emits code at compile time). However conventions like $Code where a bit jank imo, again felt like using someone's home-spun scripting language, rather than a well thought out solid design, versus something like Rust's Syn.

I know Jon Blow hates "design by committee", as he is so much smarter than others, but honestly a lot of this felt like listening to any sane reviewers would catch this stuff. I mean really basic stuff like #cast which reads like a compile-time macro/pragma, but its actually a runtime cast? Or mixing casing conventions, underscores or not, etc. Names of modules are all over the place, it just feels like one dude trying to make a half-baked lang over a long period while being distracted doing 20 other things.

How about everyone just ignore this completely until OAI meets publication standards? Having a bunch of people reading and revising these proofs is just going to be used to train the AI to further displace mathematicians. Collective action problem, but just saying "these proofs are indiscernable and won't be accepted" should be permitted.

A human mathematician that turned in this kind of unreadable detritus wouldn't get published, and they would be laughed away.

This is just getting unpaid volunteers to wade through the AI slop, and refine / correct it for them (assuming there are no major errors).

Agreed, its just his idiosyncratic styled language for doing so. Like I said in another comment, using it for any other purpose feels like using Unreal Engine for anything but 3d first person shooters. You're going to have a bad time if you're making a 2d mobile-first puzzler. And that's why I don't see it gaining much traction (probably in the neighborhood of gdscript, haxe, or verse).

If you are making custom game engines, Jai has some conveniences (especially if you don't use any libraries or care about docs, ecosystem, community, etc). And if you really like "roll your own" with a dash of "everyone thinks I'm nuts but I'm just that much smarter", its perfect. Its one step above "I wrote my own scripting language".

Somewhat, in terms of macro munging vs actual templates and other conveniences yes, however its still very possible to have unsafe memory operations and to accidentally create unexpected behavior. They have their own footguns in some ways, for example Jai's use of arenas can be tricky in more complex programs (e.g. you stored a value with a reference or array, the arena expired). Great for games, bad for most normal code.

Hence why I say, if you are doing complex / multi-threaded code, good luck to you.

This is why the GC and memory safe languages have mostly taken over. They have even more ergonomic syntax, and none of the footguns. You can still do all the normal pointer casting / abuse type stuff in most of these languages too.

Besides, someone is probably watching so they can learn how to pick up $15,000 whenever they find it! I'm most certainly not going to tell them.

Hillarious how people are like "I don't want my AI agent to do this hack, because people are probably watching the server, so they will see what the agent outputs." Hah, they can also prompt an agent for less than $500 to find out (also the CVE is public info).

There is a contingent of people that truly believe this, and I feel like that is what is motivating a lot of these "better C" languages. For me, those languages always leave me realizing I need to implement my own v-tables in 2026.

God help you if you are doing multi-threaded with closures and callbacks, web programming, something high level like ML, etc. I feel like the thesis statement of Jai starts with "Ok, so lets assume most programmers are trying to program custom game engines...". True for a very limited set of people, but makes it very painful to use generally.

Its the same feeling you get trying to use Unreal for anything except 3D first person shooters. Its possible, it just doesn't feel very good, and you start to see all the quirky assumptions of the framework.

Yeah I'm sure there are some people who just want C with better syntax and faster compile times, for them I think it could be fine (assuming they don't need well tested 3rd party libs, an ecosystem, documentation, portability, or robust tooling).

I just meant as my general purpose goto language, I couldn't add to the roster. C++ is already filling that niche for me (except with all the aforementioned benefits), python for scripts, C# for a solid GC lang, there's just no place for a scrappy quirky lang with lots of sharp edges and no value propostion.

I'm just not sure why you would choose _this_ language for those needs. There are like 10 new langs that are all trying to be "the next C" and they all kinda suck (Jai included). I dunno, for me none of them had the same kind of feeling that you get from the really top-tier languages, they all felt like "we took C and solved these annoyances" not "we had a fundamentally new vision".

The whole "LLVM has made programming langs easy" is a joke, unless your language is just a syntax wrapper over C-like functionality (so those saying such things are kind of telling on themselves).

Having really sophisticated memory management, type checking, semantics, safety guarantees, etc. is not at all trivial. The only part that has gotten easier is syntax => AST => machine code, but that is probably 10% of a PL if you want it to do something people will actually use.

Of course Jai "is fast" (meaning it has none of those things), so obviously LLVM is 90% of the work (just translating AST into LLVM calls). Yes, you can do this with AI in an afternoon, no its not useful to anyone. The real work of making a usable, interesting, useful language is not diminished, and it has little to do with the syntax => AST => LLVM part of the compiler.

Said another way, no one is choosing C, C++, Python, or Java because they are "easy ways to get generate machine code". They choose them because they have: superior semantics (design, memory management, portability etc), 3rd party libraries, frameworks, debuggers, ecosystem, documentation, support, standard library, etc.

My comment on Jai is that it is a language with some conveniences, but ultimately no strong reason to favor it. Similar to zig, odin, and others, its basically just C with some syntax conveniences.

It has some design choices that I appreciated at first, but are really strongly suited to a particular way of writing games, and I wouldn't call it general purpose (those same design choices are very limiting in other domains).

I do appreciate compiler speed, but ultimately I bounced off of it because the slight improvement in syntax doesn't justify losing massive tooling, libraries, docs, support, etc.

The language is also quite quirky in its conventions, which I think is due to Jon Blow's style, but which can feel quite odd to anyone who has a wider breadth of programming (than just custom game engines).

Also of course, any contributions or suggestions are met with the typical JB politeness and charm :)

All the flaws people mention here, are simply because you just don't get what a genius he is, those are actually features!

first time? Welcome to the irrational SV investor world. Its about hype, perception, politics, perceived future returns, not actual market fit and the proven viability of a technology. Its pets.com, myspace, and NVIDIA pumps because people want to 10x the money now.

Everyone and their dog has been saying its a bubble, there is no moat, this is all known techniques being scaled (very inefficiently) onto increasingly expensive hardware clusters at exponential cost, etc.

this is the key. Of course, investor-owned utilities will try to charge as much as they can to maximize return on capital. The major question is "do we want to maximize return on capital in our utilities?". I would argue the answer is no since providing utilities is a public good and facilitates all other activities in the society, and forms natural monopolies.

Reframing "talking through the problem", "taking notes", and "sketching the problem" as "Chain of thought". Its interesting, I wonder if people did the same reverse anthropomorphizing of their own characteristics in the era when we conceptualized the brain as water in tubes or clockwork?

I suppose this is where "gears turning" and "screw loose" come from, vestiges of that time. It will be interesting once we emerge from our current attention sequence model fever dream what vestiges leave a lasting imprint in the parlance.

this isn't an unexpected take from someone who is rich and famous for being a "math explainer". If you make your living explaining other people's proofs, then it makes sense to say "don't worry about _how_ the math gets done, you can still explain it, or supervise it." It will be interesting to see how he would react if his channel was overtaken by AI that was RL trained to produce 3b1b content, and produced better content than him, at a faster pace, so he lost his viewership. Then would he be satisfied with: "ok but now you can oversee a machine to make your videos, its not like 'making explainer videos' is inherently meaningful".

Same with programmers. The craftsmen feel the hit, the people that just saw it as a job and/or code as an obstacle to making a product say "what's the big deal, code was just a tool all along".

The end state is that more and more activity will consolidate to fewer controllers because of capital costs. Eventually the "makers" will be outcompeted by the few companies holding all the robots / AI swarms (at which point the other crabs in the bucket will say "told you so"). Sure you could create a startup, at which point your idea is instantly replicated (assuming it wasn't already thought of by millions of agents). Then you're merely facing the huge marketing, name recognition, and production ability of the megacorp versus your one unknown idea for the "factory" you "manage".

That's what's missing from the "factory manager" discussion -- how well can you compete with a Toyota factory? You're free to create your own factory right now. And just wait for the regulatory capture...