Assumptions

• Generative coding is going to be the dominant way of coding soon
  • lack of generative coding will mean users won't want to use dark
• The Dark language remains incomplete
  • Our attention to backwards compatibility for existing users+code has made iterating on the language slow
• The code editing experience in dark isn't great (fluid, client)
  • The client is a mess, lots of tech debt, hard to iterate and make good progress on

Goals

• We need to switch to be AI-first
  • it doesn't need to be chatgpt, maybe other models will be more appropriate
• We need to aggressively skip forward in our development of the language and ecosystem
  • We need to dump a ton of technical debt

Solutions

Technical debt

• Stop working on the existing client
  • find new ways of creating/editing code
  • Switch to ChatGPT for creating code
  • abandon Fluid editor for now
  • Make a CLI to get started
  • Make a VS Code extension/LSP later
• Skip the language forward
  • Leave existing backend running for current customers
  • Make a new repo and adapt the language to what we know we want with no backwards compatibility concerns
    • verb-noun-number.darklang.io instead of builtwithdark.com
    • remove null
    • DB should use types
    • remove old broken type-checking
    • new HTTP handlers
    • no queue for now
    • Remove any JSON.NET (esp JWT fns)
    • Remove all legacy stuff
    • async-first
    • new if
    • sum-types
    • records vs dicts
    • reference dbs, functions, etc, by ID, not by name
      • content-addressable?
    • remove deprecated functions
    • Drop the old HttpClient in favor of HttpBaseClient
  • build entire Apiserver portion in Dark
• Drop existing support of Static Assets hosting/serving (done)
• Skip the infra forward
  • No k8s
    • Google Cloud Run
    • managed certs
    • cloud storage
    • static assets?
  • new DB?
    • we can start with a clean DB, allowing users to migrate later
    • a cloud-native (no downtime) DB would be great (eg Alloy, Neon, Spanner, Cockroach)

ChatGPT-first

• Develop a straight-forward way to send a prompt to chatgpt to create darklang code
• Need to validate that we can, in fact, do this
• Focus on our strengths
  • high-level, immutable language
  • built-in packages (raise level of abstraction, use chatGPT to build them)
  • deployless (locking, migrations, feature flags - how to change existing code)
  • managed infra
• Use it with full language

Implementation

1. Validate
   1. Confirm we can write apps like this, today or in the near future
   2. write an simple app using a dark-like model and chatgpt
   3. write a complex app using a dark-like model and chatgpt
   4. how do we make chatgpt create dark code
   5. make an entire dark app using chatgpt