Compilers of Intent

June 20, 2025

Compilers of Intent

Maybe the most disconcerting thing about the recent coding agents has been their ability to take imprecise instruction and render precise, working code. Programming languages are formal things; they have a clear syntax, clear rules, that can be parsed and manipulated into trees. A programmer has an intent, which they specify in code, which is then compiled and progressively lowered to machine instructions. Yes it’s complicated. Yes, no single person can understand it. But the grammar was all well defined. The new coding agents are a total departure from how we have built up abstractions in the past. It’s why “vibe coding” feels so strange, it’s a completely uncertain, novel, and hyper productive way to translate intent into working machine code.