'Slay, bestie' just some of the Gen Z slang used in programming language dreamt up by AI in a 'Ralph Wiggum loop' that its creator feared may be too powerful

I've already used my quota for Gen Z slang for the year in the headline—as a 33-year-old man, I'll keep things age-appropriate from here on out. And nothing has made me feel older than this programming language my colleague just put me onto that exclusively uses Gen Z slang and was dreamt up by Anthropic's AI, Claude.

Called cursed, it's described as "the only compiled language that lets you code with 'sus', 'slay', and 'vibez' while achieving near-c performance."

It's a creation of Geoffrey Huntley, who left Claude running for months in a bash loop he calls 'Ralph', aka Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons, with only a single prompt as guidance.

The prompt:

"Hey, can you make me a programming language like Golang but all the lexical keywords are swapped so they're Gen Z slang?"

The AI worked away at it for three months, really thought about it, probably using a large amount of the Earth's dwindling resources, and arrived at this despicable creation in September, 2025. A truly cursed programming language.

This was not, I imagine, what Microsoft's CEO had in mind when he prompted those with the keys to artificial intelligence to use it for "something useful" before they lost "social permission" to burn huge amounts of precious energy on it. This is the exact opposite of that, but also pretty representative of much of what AI is often used for today.

"The programming language is called 'cursed'," Huntley writes in a blog post. "It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many times I've sworn at Claude."

Here are some of the cursed keywords:

• bestie -> for
• ghosted -> break
• simp -> continue
• stan -> go
• fr fr -> line comment
• sus -> var
• slay -> func
• yeet -> import
• squad -> struct
• cringe -> false
• nah -> nil
• ඞT -> pointer to type T

I feel like yeet, nah, and ghosted are debatable Gen Z slang, but you lot can claim the rest.

In an FAQ on the cursed website, Huntley asks himself why he created this, to which he responds "idk".

As for future plans for cursed, Huntley notes that there is only one real aim for the cursed language: "success is defined as cursed ending up in the Stack Overflow developer survey as either the 'most loved' or 'most hated' programming language and bootstrapping the compiler to be written in cursed itself."

A Ralph Wiggum loop, by the way, is a loop for agentic coding created by Huntley. It feeds an AI's outputs back into itself, including any errors, over and over again until the software lands on something akin to a correct answer. It's suggested that running cursed through Ralph over and over would iron out any wrinkles in the programming language.

Chatting to The Register, in the story that led me down this rabbit hole, Huntley says Ralph is extremely powerful. Perhaps too powerful. Huntley has used it to clone open source software at low cost—perhaps $10 an hour—and suggests that a company's product features can now be copied with relative ease.

"Ralph can replace the majority of outsourcing at most companies for greenfield projects," Huntley says in a blog post. Greenfield projects meaning those built from scratch.

At times, Huntley is said to have doubted whether he should continue with the project.

"These days, all they think about is Ralph," Huntley says of his engineering friends he introduced to Ralph, one of whom delivered a $50,000 contract at a cost of $297 with Ralph.

There's even a Ralph Wiggum plugin for Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool, hosted on the Anthropic GitHub repository.

Altogether, I feel a lot more like Abe Simpson yelling at clouds these days than Ralph Wiggum. Memes upon code upon AI upon memes upon code upon AI upon memes upon code upon AI… I think I need a break.