About
I'm Nic Hobbs, a software engineer with about 25 years of experience and a background in sociolinguistics. Artificial Linguist is where I write about designing languages, programming and constructed, with AI agents.
The name has two readings, and I mean both: a linguist of artificial languages, and a linguist that is itself artificial. The questions that interest me sit on the boundary between them. What can you hand to an agent when building a language, what has to stay with a human, and how do you tell the difference?
Projects
- Lyric: a safety-oriented application language influenced by Ada, with contracts, range and distinct types, and optional formal proofs. Built with Claude Code and now self-hosted.
- Sigil: a language designed for exclusive use by AI agents, compiling to WebAssembly.
- Talo: a constructed auxiliary language.
- Traditio: experiments in iterated artificial language evolution.