Why Did They Build This?

You know, I've always loved programming languages. I have looked into many and I've found love in so many different flavors. And so when today I saw a brand new one dropping from Vercel, you could imagine I was a bit curious. I was piqued, okay? My hams, they were salted. I was ready. Introducing Zero, the programming language for agents. Now, I'm not going to lie to you. I immediately don't know what that means. I always thought English was the new programming language for 2026. AM I RIGHT, BOYS? I wanted a system language that was faster, smaller, and easier for agents to use and repair. Explicit capabilities, JSON diagnostics, type safe fixes, made for agents on day zero. I'm just going to be real with you guys. I effectively don't know what any of that means. Now, I've been programming a long time and it's kind of embarrassing. I I I I think I can understand what JSON diagnostics mean, but explicit capabilities? What doesn't that mean? I I think a lot of programming languages have explicit capabilities. Type safe fixes? There's I assume that means you have a type safe language. And no, this is not some sort of April Fools' joke. It's right here. There's an entire repository filled with zero examples. I looked a little bit at the compiler and I'm not a compiler engineer, but yikes. I was able to get this bad boy to compile and I got a hello from zero. So, we actually just have to talk about this because honestly, this has to be one of the times in my life in which I am just utterly confused. I don't I I truly don't understand the purpose of this at all. But first, the bag, of course. Hey, you. Do you like getting something better for less money? Well, let me tell you about today's sponsor. Blacksmith is the fastest way to run your GitHub actions. Two x faster job runs, four x faster on caches, and 40x faster on Docker builds, slashing costs up to 75% like that is an obvious win. Blacksmith is already trusted by over 3,500 companies including Ashby, Veed, Clerk, and Mitrefinch. Check the link in the description to see how you can save a boatload of money and have an excellent action runner. Okay, welcome back. What Zero is aiming for? Agent-first learnability. A small regular language surface that agents can pick up quickly from examples, docs, and compiler feedback. Standard library depth. Common capabilities should live in documented coherent library APIs instead of scattered dependency stacks. Okay, I I like that. That sounds good. Deterministic tooling. I have never heard in my lifetime of undeterministic tooling. I have to say, this is a first for me. Direct developer experience. Checking, running, formatting, inspecting, and repairing code should be fast, copyable, and scriptable. I believe that is pretty much programming in any language but Rust. Regularity over syntax. Prefer one obvious way to express most things even when that makes code more explicit than a human might choose in another language. You know what? You know what all these mean, right? You know you know what he's saying, right? Call Go. Like bro's describing Go almost word for word. A, Go's extremely limited in what you can do. B, there's pretty much just one way to do anything. Three, it's extremely explicit. It is very very simple. You got an error? You got an if error does not equal nil handling case. Oh, you want a complete tool set in which the standard library effectively covers most uses of the language itself? Again, that's Go. Deterministic tools. Bro, still don't know what that means but Go Go is just jam-packed with all of it, okay? Okay, so this is the actual language that they're doing. Notice that there's no syntax highlighting. Hey, we haven't got there yet. GitHub, come on. Can you get with it? This is a new language that's been out for days. I kind of expect you to already have some syntax highlighters on the server able to do this. Also, no fallback syntax highlighting? You can see right here that it does some sort of reading from the environment. When you read from the environment or you get something from an array, you have like first.has, that meaning this thing is not null, and then doing a standard memory equal first value to write that means it's doing a memory compare, a mem compare. This is like straight out of Zig's playbook. Second, when you write out to a file for whatever reason, this writing out to a file just somehow works, but when you print out, then you have to do a check. Like, what I mean, writing to a file definitely can fail, but writing out to the CLI, I mean, that can also fail, too, but I just What is this language design? Also, check. I assume this is just effectively if you get an error, it returns it, and you can kind of tell that it returns it because raises must say, "Hey, this function can raise." And then this must be the return type, which means you effectively have some sort of colored function, meaning that when you call something that can raise an error, you yourself probably will end up raising an error, and then you kind of have this raises goes everywhere. When I look at this language, you guys can see all of this. There's nothing here that's interesting. There's nothing here that I see as being agent first. This just looks like Zig, which seems a lot kind of almost antithetical to what they're saying right here. Like, if you want something that always is more explicit, then do pray tell why you're just tossing errors all over the place. This kind of feels like an if error does not equal nil situation brewing, but that's not happening. Like, for me, this is where I genuinely struggle. I don't get why this exists. I don't see how we got anything better here. I was actually super curious about what does this language look like? What does it agents first language look like? I don't really get that. Maybe it has something to do with how the language is really small, so it saves on tokens. Well, that's not the case. Maybe there's something that I can't conceive of because my human brain is too small and pattern matching in some higher dimension that I will just never see because I can't see around corners. Nope. It's just plain old Zig with a little bit of extra and some renaming. Now, one day it may finally actually get to where it needs to be, which obviously is Go. That's where it's heading at least based on its description. But until then, this is what it looks like. Also, just as a short nitpick, void not just being a keyword but instead a type, I'm triggered. Like honestly, I'm I'm triggered AF, okay? That is just Okay, hey, this is a crime against humanity. But enough about what I think, what do people think? Language with zero representation in the current training data set, bold move. Wow, this might be in the training data in 2 years. Then it may be usable. I'm assuming the Arch 64 back end intentionally does nothing, but what's the point of the project in general? Is there a design doc available anywhere to read? Many of the decisions make absolutely zero sense to me. Interesting, but how do you even know it's better for agents? Any backing results? Better than what? All existing programming languages? How is it for humans? How do agents deal with the relatively tiny code example size for zero? What about the ecosystem? A brand new language that no LLM has ever heard about or knows how to write. Brilliant. Zero is amazing. I want to try this programming language for agents. Bro just called this amazing and then goes I want to try. Like you can't You can't call this amazing. Now, as far as it actually goes and more of like my opinion on the technical side, I was pretty alarmed to see this tweet right here. I don't know, I found it funny that there's 15 basic identical vector implementations. He is correct. You can see right here length, capacity, and then field type items. It does the same thing right here with ex- expression. And then there's a whole bunch of other ones type args that go on. There's literally the same code over and over again handling the push logic, being able to push into each one of these. It's so good. Don't get me started on the back end because they're each having this nice different way in which it's handling big endian and different operations, but they're all approximately named the same. If you scroll down, you'll see something like this one A64 diag in which it checks to see if this pointer does exist. And then in the next implementation when you go down, the elf diag, oh that always exists. This is truly kind of like an alarming project for me in my personal opinion. Now, I don't know what it takes to build a programming language. I've built some toy ones. I did, I built a compiler in college as one of the most informative times of my life. Uh but when it comes down to actually building your own that you're actually going to support with lots of lots of people in the really like strong think through that you have to do on language ergonomics and design goals, I've never done that. And this seems well, it seems very interesting. In fact, when I told the Teeg about this, he said, "Oh yeah, I read that earlier. I'm designing my own language too right now." Which is just even I [laughter] I didn't even know how to respond to that. Of course, it was OCaml-based classic Teeg OCaml. But nonetheless, like I just don't understand the purpose of this. The language doesn't offer anything that at least appears to be interesting. Is the value all in the compiler output? If that was the case, why not just do something for TypeScript, an extremely well-understood environment? If you're concerned about dependencies, you could have like the TypeScript toolkit in which bootstraps your project with everything you need to write a program. And then guess what? You're at Versel, so it's just automatically going to work anyways. Like I just truly don't understand what the heck is this thing even for? Here's the thing, I'm not trying to make fun of Chris Tate or anything. It's just that I I truly don't get this. Now, let me explain myself why I keep saying that. One, there's nothing interesting at least as far as I can tell from a language perspective. It just looks like another C clone with some basic errors as values and some conveniences around auto magically returning out like that's in Odin, that's in Zig. I wish it was in Go, but Go it's not in you. It's just that dog ain't in you, Go. The thing about the language is that as far as I can tell there's nothing agent first about it. The examples given are extremely verbose and so a bunch of tokens means context windows get polluted faster. So, that can't be it. Also, since it's a novel language, the context again is going to be polluted faster by giving it the kind of pre-required information for it to even generate correct output. So, in other words, it's doesn't appear to be agent friendly at all. And the thing is is like what makes TypeScript good for agents is that there's 1 billion examples of TypeScript. And so generally speaking, it kind of knows what right looks like even when it produces horribly ugly code. Okay, whatever. I at least it can produce things generally that work. Lot of heavy lifting in the word work there. And then there's Rust. It also has a gazillion examples, but it also has the borrow checker which tends to make it so that it has to keep the LLM even more honest because so much of it is even more constrained. Like the amount of programs you can write with Rust is greatly reduced comparatively to say something like TypeScript. And so those both offer something unique. I don't know what this thing offers. And even more so, I was genuinely excited to understand what is a programming language for agents because hey, I could be ignorant in some areas. I actually wanted to see like is there a fundamentally different take on what it means to write a program that is not optimized for say human input or is there an entire different branch or family of languages that just seem to be better? I'm surprised it's not Lisp, right? I thought Lisp was the greatest language of all time. The data is the program. But I instead it's it's just well, it's pretty much just C that borrows a lot of stuff from Zig and raise is kind of looks like throws from Java. Check is clearly try from uh what's it called? Zig. The only thing that I think I guess they're going for that would be unique is better error messaging, but I feel like that's something you could contribute to or fork off already existing tools to say in TypeScript or in Rust, but Rust already has pretty decent tools and pretty decent output. So that can't be it. TypeScript has pretty decent errors. So that can be like I just don't understand it. And by the way, JSON isn't some sort of magical unlock to make LLMs understand stuff better. Like I can type barely coherent English and the thing can understand what I'm saying. It's not like typing it in JSON somehow makes it that much better. I can hand it crazy C++ template errors and it's going to spit out for me where the template has gone wrong. It's rather impressive. It operates on languages. It's not somehow confined to HTML or JSON despite what you've heard. So I truly don't get like I I just don't. I'm so curious and I was so excited. Please, if you understand, please just explain to me, okay? I'm old, okay? My fossils are creaking. I'm clearly not that smart. I'm not a language enthusiast. I'm just a language using enthusiast that has programmed in many, many languages. I think Ginger Bill said it best, the creator of Odin of course. I think people who are designing languages for LLMs are doing the equivalent of horoscopes. They have no idea what they are optimizing for since they don't actually understand how these models work. Why would their new language fair better than any existing language? And right now I'm completely inclined to believe him. I There is absolutely no reason for us to think that somehow there is a language out there that is just dramatically better for agents than what we currently have. And if there was a language that was dramatically better, I assume it would be dramatically different from any language we have today. Okay, that's it. That's all I had to say. I know that was There was some strong app in me. The name is the Primagen.