<div dir="auto">The purpose is not to have a junior programmer but to have a model of a problem in English text.<div dir="auto"> </div><div dir="auto">I would encourage you to read Omar Khattab's writings on Late Interaction models like ColBERT and ColBERT v2, as well as his work on DSPy and prompt optimization and automated LLM as judges.</div><div dir="auto"> </div><div dir="auto">My day job is as a C# engineer and I was able to systematically refactor almost 2,000 files with 230,000 lines of code. - I've also used it to understand really complex business domains and generate sample code that would have taken me 6 months or more to learn how to do by myself. In this way, it is also like having my own personal post-doc available. </div></div> <div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Nov 30, 2025, 10:34 Mark Brown <<a href="mailto:mark@mercurylang.org">mark@mercurylang.org</a>> wrote: </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi Tomas, On Sun, Oct 26, 2025 at 7:31 AM Tomas By <<a href="mailto:tomas@basun.net" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">tomas@basun.net</a>> wrote: > > Hi all, > > Just read this on Slashdot: > > | I'm a programmer who started out hesitant about AI, and at first I > | thought all that it could do was auto-complete better. > | Then I tried Claude Code, and it really is like having your own > | personal junior dev assisting you're every need. Like a junior, it > | makes mistakes, but using the *massive* amount of good code that it > | creates, and fixing what's left, is so much faster than writing it > | all from scratch yourself. > <a href="https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/25/0324244/meet-the-people-who-dare-to-say-no-to-ai" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/25/0324244/meet-the-people-who-dare-to-say-no-to-ai</a> > > and wonder if anybody has tried this with Mercury? Over the weekend I tried getting Claude to write a random maze generator that can do square or hex mazes with a bunch of algorithms, outputting a customized SVG file. This took ~150 non-trivial prompts for several thousand lines of code and a thousand or so lines of markdown documentation. Testing it thoroughly was beyond the scope of the experiment, but the output looks pretty good to me with some quick tests. The finished code looks pretty good, too, for the most part (if I wanted to work on it any further I'd ask Claude to work on improving boundary.m and render.m next). Claude put "2024" as the copyright year, which is kinda funny. Needs more recent training data! Transcripts are included with the project, if anyone wants to know how it was produced. Fwiw this is genuinely how I imagined holodecks would be programmed, except without the voice recognition :-) <a href="https://github.com/markbrown/amaze" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://github.com/markbrown/amaze</a> > > I suspect that (1) this person uses C[*]/Java, and (2) the usefulness > of this "AI" stuff for Mercury will be proportionally less in a > similar magnitude as code length for same functionality, ie a factor > ten or so. The source code for the above project is really the Markdown, not the Mercury. From what I've seen so far the choice of programming language doesn't particularly matter. As a separate experiment, I asked Claude to read the Mercury compiler source and write a document outlining the design. The result is attached. Most of it doesn't add more than the existing compiler/notes/compiler_design.html file, but the "Compilation Workflows" section looks useful. Cheers, Mark > > Anybody has any experiences? > > /Tomas > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list > <a href="mailto:users@lists.mercurylang.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">users@lists.mercurylang.org</a> > <a href="https://lists.mercurylang.org/listinfo/users" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.mercurylang.org/listinfo/users</a> _______________________________________________ users mailing list <a href="mailto:users@lists.mercurylang.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">users@lists.mercurylang.org</a> <a href="https://lists.mercurylang.org/listinfo/users" rel="noreferrer noreferrer" target="_blank">https://lists.mercurylang.org/listinfo/users</a> </blockquote></div>