#142 Why LLMs Need Their Own Programming Language: From Assembly to AI with Vaibhav Gupta // Co-founder @ BAML

From HoloLens assembly to AI: Vaibhav Gupta on why LLMs need their own language, and how BAML makes them type-safe and shippable at agent speed.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY: Blocks

A decade building computer vision and writing assembly at Microsoft (HoloLens), Google, and D.E. Shaw, then a from-scratch bet on a programming language built for LLMs. Vaibhav Gupta joins Tobi to explain why probabilistic compute needs its own tooling, what "shipping at agent speed" actually requires, and why the world's appetite for software is mathematically infinite.

Chapters: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:01:00 — From HoloLens to D.E. Shaw: a decade in computer vision and assembly 00:02:00 — Starting from scratch, and the YC pivot ("500K to not build a Slack competitor") 00:04:00 — Falling in love with coding — and bricking a few machines along the way 00:06:00 — His first AI moment: the GPT-3.5 wake-up call 00:09:00 — Code as a means to an end — why 90% of the job is plumbing 00:11:00 — Why he decided to build a language: first principles and BAML 00:13:00 — LLMs as a new compute primitive 00:15:00 — What BAML actually is — embedded, type-safe, callable from any language 00:17:00 — The business model and the "data trench" 00:19:00 — When AI ships code you didn't ask for — and why CI/CD breaks in an agent loop 00:22:00 — Live demo: function versioning and locking the codebase 00:24:00 — Why no one else competes here — Protobuf, Thrift, and Google's playbook 00:29:00 — Getting started: the BAML "hello world" (live coding) 00:32:00 — Everything is a function — type safety that runs in Rust 00:36:00 — Shipping at agent speed = trust plus granular control 00:38:00 — Visualizing code instead of reading it 00:44:00 — Where to start with BAML (docs.boundaryml.com → Agents MD) 00:45:00 — The mathematically infinite appetite for software 00:47:00 — Why we'll have 10x more builders — and why "English isn't a programming language" 00:51:00 — The future of SaaS: PaaS, harnesses, and customer-defined models 00:56:00 — Will design matter more in an agent world? 00:59:00 — The "time travel" decorator: advice to his 2017 self 01:04:00 — Outro

Quotes: 00:13:00 — "BAML's a new thing that exists because we have a new compute primitive in the form of LLMs." (verbatim) 00:10:00 — "90% of software engineering — well, in most jobs, 100% of software engineering is plumbing… And AI just takes that 90%, just makes it go away." 00:19:00 — "We can now generate code at machine speed… But we still cannot ship code at machine speed." 00:49:00 — "English can't go down to assembly… And the minute you add that to English, what have you done? You've built a new programming language." 00:45:00 — "I don't think we've yet found a company that hasn't found that I can make more money if I write more code."

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