Professor in Computer Science
A week ago, I pasted this prompt by Matt Shumer (150 words, not a single line of technical spec) into Claude Code, and went off to do something else. When I came back: a playable FPS in the browser. Not a demo, not a prototype. A game. I did it again two days later, replacing “Call of Duty” with “FIFA”, and that worked too. Then my 10-year-old nephew took over and grew both games, coming up with…
Il y a une semaine, j’ai collé ce prompt de Matt Shumer (150 mots, pas une ligne de spec technique) dans Claude Code, et je suis allé faire autre chose. En rentrant : un FPS jouable dans le navigateur. Pas une démo, pas un prototype. Un jeu. J’ai recommencé deux jours plus tard en remplaçant “Call of Duty” par “FIFA”, et ça a marché aussi. Puis mon neveu de 10 ans a fait évoluer les deux jeux, en…
L’exemple est devenu un classique : “Je dois laver ma voiture. Le centre de lavage est à 100 m. J’y vais à pied ou en voiture ?”. Réponse de sens commun : en voiture, évidemment, sinon la voiture n’est pas là pour être lavée. Sauf que la plupart des LLMs tombent dans le panneau et recommandent la marche pour des raisons d’écologie ou de courte distance.
I had the pleasure of serving as a reviewer for Younoussa Sow’s PhD defense in Lille, on a topic that is both challenging and fascinating: the automatic migration of Esope to Fortran 2008. This CIFRE PhD, carried out with Framatome and co-supervised by Nicolas Anquetil and Stéphane Ducasse, tackles a major modernization challenge: migrating around one million lines of scientific code built on…
BFChess is a UCI-compatible chess engine written entirely in Brainfuck. The generated engine is 5.6 MB of raw Brainfuck code (eight distinct characters: ><+-.,[]), produced by a 7,400-line Python compiler. Here is what a small excerpt of the engine looks like: It implements depth-3 minimax search with alpha-beta pruning, full move generation (including castling, en passant, and promotion), and…
Corners and set pieces are one of football’s most debated topics. “Arsenal are unstoppable from corners,” “Marseille are hopeless on free kicks,” and so on. Opinions, gut feelings, conventional wisdom. But sometimes the data surprises: did you know that Tottenham, fighting relegation in the Premier League, are on the European podium for corner goals this season, just behind Arsenal and Inter? What…
On parle souvent des corners et des coups de pied arrêtés (CPA) au café du commerce, sur les réseaux sociaux, ou dans les médias. “Arsenal est injouable sur corners”, “L’OM est nul sur coups francs”, etc. Des impressions, des ressentis. Et parfois des surprises : saviez-vous que Tottenham, à la lutte pour le maintien en Premier League, est sur le podium européen des buts sur corners cette saison,…
What happens when you challenge a coding agent with an esoteric programming language it has never seen (freshly invented, with very few examples), and where the source code is literally colored M&Ms on a table? No documentation beyond the opcode table. No Stack Overflow threads. No training examples to memorize. Just six candy colors, a stack machine, and a dare. I tried it with MNM Lang, a toy…
Can coding agents understand and apply a programming paradigm they’ve (almost certainly) never seen in training data? Not a standard design pattern, not something from a textbook, but an esoteric hack from an obfuscated C contest: Printf-Oriented Programming (aka POP). The idea is that printf is Turing complete, but can coding agents leverage that fact to write real programs in printf? I tried.…
What happens when you ask a 2026 coding agent like Claude Code to build a chess engine from scratch (with no plan, no architecture document, no step-by-step guidance) in a language that was never designed for this purpose? Building a chess engine is a non-trivial software engineering challenge: it involves board representation, move generation with dozens of special rules (castling, en passant,…