Blog

"!throws looks like not." That one line was enough for Claude to drop its own effect syntax, while declaring a method took five rounds. Eleven stories of why Nova's syntax is the way it is, and a checklist of when to push back on AI and when to agree.

Nova's first compiler, Oracle in Rust, hit a dead end: for a month the agents and I "fixed" type inference, the reports were green, and the work stood still. The second, Carina, was written from scratch in Nova itself and built itself, byte for byte. How it went, step by step, and seven techniques for checking agents' work.

A month building Nova with autonomous AI agents: around 300 engineering plans closed, almost 2000 tests passing. Four categories of failure that show up regularly, and the discipline that catches them.

Introducing Nova — what it is, why I am building it, and what works today: algebraic effects, static contracts, M:N runtime, and documentation tooling. A look at the bootstrap stage and the road ahead.