13 · The premise
Can an AI reliably write a language it's barely seen?
Yes, because Glyph is a disciplined subset of TypeScript with an ML core. Most of what a model already knows about TypeScript carries over, and the compiler names the places it doesn't.
Why it matters
It's the fair skeptic's question: an LLM predicts the next token from the huge body of existing-language code, so a language with almost no training data should be hard to write. The answer is structural: Glyph isn't alien. It looks like TypeScript, so the model already knows most of it; the differences are few, enumerable, and each one fails fast at compile time rather than passing silently.
See it
An agent that guesses wrong doesn't ship the guess. It gets a precise, fixable error and corrects in the same loop:
// agent writes, reaching for a TypeScript habit: if user.admin { grant() } [E0006] Glyph has no `if` ╰─ `match` is the only conditional: match user.admin { true => grant(), false => void, }
The error names the Glyph construct and shows the shape, so the fix is one edit away: no source-diving, no guessing. That tight loop is what compensates for the missing training data. In our own adversarial testing, an agent built a real REST API (typed records, tagged-union validation, auth middleware) to a green build in about two iterations. And to remove the last friction, one document (llms.txt) takes an agent from zero to correct, runnable Glyph.
Where it stands
Shipping today
A subset-of-TypeScript design, Elm-quality errors that name the fix, and llms.txt / glyph llms one-document onboarding for any agent.
Being proven
A success-rate benchmark (tries-to-correct against TypeScript on the same task) to turn “it held up” into a measured number.