Total Internal Reflection

In Rigour by Design I argued that almost everyone is parked on the bottom rung of the spec ladder, and that what GenAI actually made cheap is the labour of climbing.

Software is hard.

There is an optimistic and a pessimistic reading of what GenAI does to the problem of large legacy codebases.

Software architecture is not politically neutral.

RedDragon is a multi-language interpreter/compiler that lowers 16 languages (Python, Java, Go, TypeScript, Rust, C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Kotlin, Lua, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Scala, COBOL) down to a shared IR.

Two agentic development frameworks applied to the same multi-layer type migration across a 13,000-test compiler pipeline.

Tracing the full arc of a multi-phase refactoring — from “Java string concatenation crashes the VM” to “every value in the system carries its type” — done across a dozen sessions with Claude Code over two days.

Notes from building a multi-language code analysis engine across 400+ conversation sessions with Claude Code.

A universal IR with per-opcode typed instructions, 15 deterministic frontends, LLM-assisted repair/lowering/execution, a deterministic VM with class hierarchy support, overload resolution, and cross-language slicing, a structured type system with generics…

In this post, I’ll talk about how I wrote a small Virtual Machine in Prolog which can both interpret concrete assembly language-like programs, and run basic symbolic executions, which are useful in data flow analyses of programs.