I built a programming language using Claude Code
March 12, 2026
Over the course of four weeks in January and February, I built a new programming language using Claude Code. I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that. You can find the source code on GitHub, along with build instructions and example programs.
I went into this experiment with some skepticism. My previous attempts at building something entirely using Claude Code hadn’t worked out. But this attempt has not only been successful, but produced results beyond what I’d imagined possible. I don’t hold the belief that all software in the future will be written by LLMs. But I do believe there is a large subset that can be partially or mostly outsourced to these new tools.
Building Cutlet taught me something important: using LLMs to produce code does not mean you forget everything you’ve learned about building software. Agentic engineering requires careful planning, skill, craftsmanship, and discipline, just like any software worth building before generative AI. The skills required to work with coding agents might look different from typing code line-by-line into an editor, but they’re still very much the same engineering skills we’ve been sharpening all our careers.
Geoff Huntley, the discoverer of the Ralph Wiggum technique, used that approach, or indeed discovered that approach, while developing a programming language he called Cursed.
Over the last couple of months Ankur Sethi developed his own, probably somewhat less cursed programming language. And here he writes about his experience with that and broader experience working with large language models.
