40% of code is now machine-written. That number's only going up. So I spent some weekends asking: what would an intermediate language look like if we stopped pretending humans are the authors?
NERD is the experiment.
Bootstrap compiler works, compiles to native via LLVM. It's rough, probably wrong in interesting ways, but it runs. Could be a terrible idea. Could be onto something. Either way, it was a fun rabbit hole.
Contributors welcome if this seems interesting to you - early stage, lots to figure out: https://github.com/Nerd-Lang/nerd-lang-core
Happy to chat about design decisions or argue about whether this makes any sense at all.
On New Year's Eve I announced NERD - a language built for LLMs, not for human authorship. The response was unexpectedly overwhelming. Questions, excitement, discussions, roasting - all of it.
But one question struck me: "What use case is this language built for?"
Fair. Instead of a general-purpose language covering all features - some of which may not even be relevant because we're not building apps the old way anymore - I picked one: agent-first.
What this means - you can now run an agent in NERD with one line of code:
-- Nerd code llm claude "What is Cloudflare Workers?"
No imports. No boilerplate. No framework.
The insight from working with agents and MCP: tools are absorbing integration complexity. Auth, retries, rate limiting - all moving into tool providers. What's left for agents? Orchestration.
And orchestration doesn't need much: → LLM calls → Tool calls → Control flow → That's it.
Every language today - Python, TypeScript, Java - was built for something else, then repurposed for agents. NERD starts from agents.
Fully story here: https://www.nerd-lang.org/agent-first