Making a programming language - BAML. @boundaryml, 🦄 aitw podcast: piped.video/@boundaryml prev YC, google, msft, deshaw, and other things

Seattle, WA
Slop is code you dont read. And better models means more slop. the solution? write sloppy tools to build stable systems. but for the most committed people, go build new foundational systems. Rebuild github, rebuild tmux, rebuild database, and yes rebuild programming languages. Big thanks to @swyx and the whole community for having us out at @aiDotEngineer
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Composites are a great add for js, but I’m always curious, why was this not the default? I suspect eq by value is more frequent than eq by identity. The frequent use case should be the default!
ECMAScript excitement 😉 Congrats to @acutmore from @TechAtBloomberg on advancing the Composites proposal to Stage 2 at @TC39 today 🎉 Composites are objects that are compared by value instead of identity. They are an evolution of Record & Tuple proposal.
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fun talk today! every single agent in the world will have their own email soon. it’s the future. email is the perfect communication platform for agents. it’s a 50+ yr old protocol & it’s not going anywhere. give your agent an email in two minutes w/ @primitive📧
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sad i missed it! recording?!
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Agents are the oxygen that oxidize rust.
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AI will never ever write code in assembly. Lets me tell you why. I spent most of my career writing assembly, and the hardest part of job was never to write things in ASM, it was deciding what to write in ASM. Writing things in ASM has a real tax. You lock in architectures, memory layouts, and making your code fast, means making it more rigid. Think about our supply chains during covid. Shipping stops and suddenly everything breaks. Speed is never free. AI might write some code in ASM, but only if the value you're getting is worth the benefit. New folks can benefit from SSE/AVX instructions, but the majority of code in the world needs to remain flexible and updatable. At 1M Tokens / second, would you rather generate a for loop in ASM? or an entire app in Python? Time will always be money and compilers and higher level languages are going to win. Hopefully BAML :)
Replying to @vaibcode
It looks very interesting, great work! But on the other hand, I doubt that in a year we'll still be writing and reading code ourselves. Why do we need another programming language if AI will probably be writing code directly in assembly?
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Hot take: every architecture benefits from well structured data
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correct take!
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Replying to @vaibcode
Buddy... You're a YC larper reinventing the wheel with something no corporation will ever adopt or use. I'll let the agents decide when to write what in the SaaS stack in ASM
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I’m curious, in a world where the agents decide everything for you, what decisions are you making?
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TypeScript is the second-worst language ever created, right after Java.
typescript inference is expensive to understand
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You gotta go learn the archaic rules behind python first
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Replying to @vaibcode
You aren’t even remotely capable of what a frontier model can do, so stop pretending like you are the authority on what language the stack will use 🙃
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Go write your saas app in ASM and report back.
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Sounds like we need a new language 🤔 Boundaryml.com
JavaScript was never designed for the server. If that doesn't change soon, JavaScript on the server will be replaced by Rust. The fix needs to happen in the engine. Sound types. Ahead-of-time compilation. Threads with shared objects.
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That the last thing we need
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That’s right. Once we’re done with baml we can all stop everything. Last thing we’ll ever need! 🫡
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Replying to @vaibcode
since you’re working on language-native o11y I think you probably have a great answer. Is there value in allowing the agent to explore data layouts in asm? Or is this something that’ll be solved via better guidelines and perf focused post training nitter.net/kamikaz1_k/status/2104…?
Replying to @kellabyte
It was a facepalm moment, and I did see your Mitchell RT earlier. But is there something to be said about the language nudging the AI into arranging things better? Is it just training distributions bubbling up again? Could be cool as a guiding tool…if effective
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modern compilers are really really good. in terms of exploring data layouts, I prefer writing in a language with a good compiler and then using AI to inspect the compiled ASM with me to see what we’ve gotten! It’s much faster to understand larger volumes of changes.
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Replying to @vaibcode
But AI writing in LLVM IR is not beyond the realm of possibility 👀
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I mean models are good enough to write in any language. LLVM IR still expresses ideas much more verbosely than Python / TS / BAML per se. And in many scenarios that verbosity may not be buying you anything.
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Replying to @vaibcode
I take a bet against that if the time horizon is not tomorrow. 5 years from now. You set the challenge. Winner buys dinner
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5 years from now there will be more ASM than today, but there will be even more higher level language code than that. I’ll take the bet!
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Replying to @vaibcode
Early on I thought JEV was going to make BAML irrelevant, but playing with it, am I realizing it makes BAML even more relevant. Just like realizing that I can use BAML in Langgraph nodes I see a future where BAML abstract all models including all system one types
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You can do this already!
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Replying to @vaibcode
AI can track stability of a system and once unchanged for long enough rewrite into ASM? otherwise sounds like a very fair point
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The hard thing about software is that something may not have changed for 1 year and then suddenly need to change. Also modern compilers are very very good. Writing in asm doesn’t automatically mean it’s faster
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Replying to @vaibcode
the “AI will just write assembly directly” take always seems to come from people who think there is one universal type of assembly that works on all machines
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wait till they learn about xtensa!
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Jarred wants to save JavaScript by making it faster with Rust. DHH never wants to program again. Effect devs think Effect will save TypeScript. All current languages and frameworks are dead. In the end, only math will matter. Never thought I'd live to see this. And I love it.
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Yep! Every existing language was designed for a world assuming some human read that line of code. New languages need to exist designed for the opposite world: humans have read the least lines of code and code can be fixed quickly and reactively.
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Who is building an agent-first programming language? Something that is optimized for correctness and does not need to care about human ergonomics and brevity. Like rust but 100 times more autistic.
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brew install baml
Sounds like we need a new language 🤔 Boundaryml.com
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Replying to @vaibcode
What's the learning curve, cause am here suffering with rust and seeing rust ++ ... 🤦🏾‍♂️
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It’s basically semantics of rust, but no lifetimes to deal with. Plus we brought in unions from typescript! We do live onboardings every Thursday if you’re interested boundaryml.com/eap
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Replying to @vaibcode
Correctness of Rust and concurrency of Go don’t really mix though? And neither do dynamism of Python and correctness of Rust. How do you square that circle?
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re the dynamic of python, this post explains it better nitter.net/vaibcode/status/210372… but concurrency and correctness are a notoriously hard duo. Given that the target for what people should build in BAML is application code not systems code, we bias a bit more towards practical concurrency over lifetime management. this mean: 1. we make it possible to cancel hot loops 2. we have really nice thread pool ergonomics 3. we can support durable execution / multi-machine concurrency (not yet shipped, still in slop stage and needs to be cleaned up) 4. all container types are threadsafe w/o gil you can still run into data races/logic bugs, but we think with really good tracing / observability you'll be able to diagnose issues much better. to help with this, we made BTEL - our improvement over OTEL - thats just 10ns overhead on function calls, and 1000s of times smaller in memory/disk footprint.
Replying to @capythanh
we worked really hard to add type safety to runtime reflection and eval. two examples of things we enable are: compile code at runtime and get back a typed function with a checked signature. build a class at runtime, unreflect it, and use that same runtime type as a compile time generic parameter.
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Replying to @vaibcode
why not just golang?
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go has a lot of things that i love, but misses so much as well: union types, the open interfaces things always bothers me, generics were introduced too late into the language, rusts Result type > go's error tuple.
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