For the past 15 years I have wanted to write a Scheme implementation that was, effectively, macros to LLVM. When I first got my hands on Cursor and was looking for some random, non-critical project to "vibe code" on, I remembered this idea from long ago. After a heady weekend of truly vibing with Cursor, having it ask all the right questions and make amazing suggestions, I had a complete project that...crashed immediately at any attempt to even compile.

The code was complete garbage, but the feeling was real, and the Vibe programming language was born. It's taken a year of nights-and-weekends, but I finally have a self-hosting variant of a Scheme built up on top of LLVM.

Along the way, I have learned so much about what it means to code with an LLM as your partner. I have tried, true to its name, to only vibe-code Vibe...though I have had to get my hands dirty and touch the code on a few occasions. (Cursor's Composer 1.5 has a real problem with balancing parens...which makes me think that implementing runtime structured editing might start moving up on the list of desired features.)

It should go without saying: Vibe is not even on the horizon of "production ready"...but I have a sense that it could get there faster than you might expect.