Conference In 6 weeks
December
Monday
to Tue 8 December 2026 · Sydney time
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Speakers: Burin Choomnuan (NewsCorp Australia)
Track: Software Engineering
Jolt and jank are two young Clojure implementations, one running on Chez Scheme and one compiling to native code through C++/LLVM. Between them they have almost no public code for a model to have learned from. Ask Claude for jank and it confidently writes JVM Clojure, and none of that compiles. Over six days in July I ported 209 of raylib's official C examples to jank anyway, across 194 commits. Then again in Jolt, and once more in JVM Clojure over Panama. That's 422 working examples across three runtimes, every one of them driving the same C game library.
This talk is about the harness, because the model was the same model everyone in the room already uses. Everything around it is what changed. Three pieces do most of the work. The compiler becomes the eval, so "Mismatched 'if' branch types 'Color' and 'nil'" is a grading signal, and every error the model hits once turns into a rule it never hits twice. The trap catalog is context engineering with receipts: a 240-line AGENTS.md where each rule cites the committed example that proves it. Verification has to be cheap and unattended, so a graphics program that opens a window gets an alarm, a screenshot and an exit code an agent can read on its own.
The failures get airtime too. The model never derived the AArch64 rule that lets a 24-byte struct pass as a pointer, and no prompt got it there. You'll leave with all four artifacts, and a way to size up any codebase your agent has never seen.
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