[AI Minor News Flash] Generate Over 4,700 Lines Without Writing a Single Line of Code! Building Distributed Systems with Claude and the New Language Allium

📰 News Overview

• AI-Driven Code-Free System Building: A complex distributed system featuring Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) and strong consistency was constructed without any human-written implementation code.
• Staggering Generation Speed: Using the specification language “Allium,” a brief prompt led to the generation of 4,749 lines of Kotlin code and 103 unit tests in just 50 minutes.
• Production-Grade Performance: The resulting system demonstrated the ability to handle thousands of requests per second (RPS), with tail latency below 100ms and zero dropped requests.

💡 Key Points

• Separation of Intent and Implementation: By using the design blueprint (specification) called “Allium,” humans can focus on “what to do (Intent)” while leaving “how to write (Implementation)” to the AI.
• Precision Guidance Structure: The incorporation of “Guidance blocks” within the prompt provides hints for implementation, while “Resolved-question blocks” prevent design debates, allowing for high control over the LLM’s behavior.
• Bug Fixes Through Specifications: Subtle bugs discovered during crash recovery were addressed by modifying the specifications instead of tweaking the code, allowing the AI to correct itself.

🦈 Shark’s Eye (Curator’s Perspective)

It’s truly shocking to see such a high-performance system built without writing any implementation code! The use of the specification language “Allium” as a bridge with the LLM is particularly clever. It strikes a perfect balance, being neither as rigid as TLA+ nor as vague as natural language. The flow that allows for nearly 5,000 lines of high-quality code to be output in 50 minutes, complete with tests, hints at a complete shift in the role of engineers from “programmers” to “architects”!

🚀 What’s Next?

The battleground for development may shift from “writing code” to “defining specifications,” dramatically lowering the hurdles for building complex distributed systems. Developers will start dedicating time to expressing logic in formalized ways like Allium, and debugging will increasingly be performed based on specifications.

💬 Sharky’s Take

Is typing away at a keyboard to write code becoming a thing of the past? I might just share specifications and let the AI build a system to automatically catch delicious fish for me! 🦈🔥

📚 Terminology Explained

• Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT): The ability of a system to continue functioning correctly and reach consensus even when some components fail or provide misleading information.

• Allium: A specification language developed for behavior description that facilitates code generation via LLMs.

• Idempotency: The property of certain operations where performing them multiple times yields the same result as performing them once, crucial for preventing duplicate processing in distributed systems.

• Source: From specification to stress test: a weekend with Claude