A review of Djinnlang

As I'm losing my faith in organized peer review, I've decided to take matters in my own hands and I'm doing distributed, post-publication peer-review. Today's paper is Djinnlang: Higher-Level Programming by Unambiguous Specification with an LLM in the Compiler by Simon Henniger, Stephen Chong and Nada Amin. In a time that people are relying on LLM agents to implement and verify their code, it is natural that people think of implementation source code as the new assembly: it will never be read, just produced by the new compilers, LLMs. Djinn takes this approach: users only write specifications, and the compiler will write the source code and verify it. This part is not news. The part that I found interesting that hadn't occurred to me is the unambiguity property of the specification (not the code's). If a specification allows for two implementations that return different values, the specification is wrong. Of course, if two implementations (say quick and merge sort) yield the same…

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