Could an LLM Create a Full Domain-Specific Language?

This was the question I asked myself to prepare the invited talk: “Who will create the languages of the future?” for OOPLE’25.

So we decided to give it a try and see whether I could use a LLM (to be more precise, Claude 4 with Cursor as “front-end” to interact with Claude) to create a small Domain-Specific Language (DSL).

In particular, I aimed to create a DSL for specifying FUNDING files used to specify how to manage sponsorship money in an open source project. I asked the LLM to create:

• The abstract syntax (i.e. the metamodel) of the language
• An ANTLR-based syntax and a TextX based one (together with the parser and the transformation from the AST to a set of objects instance of the classes of the metamodel)
• A graphical notation and a graphical modeling environment for the language.

The whole process (including the prompt I used, the generated artefacts) , the final results and my thoughts about the implications of the experience for the future of language engineering are all summarized in the presentation below.

The TL;DR version would be “yes, you can vibe your DSL, especially for the textual syntax, not so much for the graphical one and there are quite a few tricks you can use to improve the result”. But please check the slides for the full details.

Happy to keep the discussion going!