Yet another Hacker News

I built a programming language that LLMs can't use

23 points dom96 23 hours ago 19 comments

prologic 22 hours ago | parent

May I ask what the motivation behind KilllSwitch is? Out of curiosity, I decided to test your claims and asked Claude to build a program in Go and Claude Skill that is able to decompile (from) and compile (to) KS programs along with a Claude Skill that doesn't trip it up. It all works™ -- All your example programs.

So, whilst I _think_ you've built a very clever interpreter, I don't think you can get around the fact that someone (like me) could just build around the noise you've created anyway.

Right?

dom96 12 hours ago | parent

The motivation is to build a language that is ideally impossible for LLMs to read/write/understand, or at the very least as difficult as possible. It's cool that you've given it a try, but if you feed Claude the KillSwitch source code it can feasibly just analyse the Rust interpreter source code and likely get around understanding the language itself.

I'm much more interested in the benchmarks[1] I have built which do show LLMs not being able to gain full ability to understand it. The benchmarks only give the model access to the interpreter binary and the spec, nothing else and no internet access. I'd also be interested in other's ideas of how to make the language even more resistant to LLMs/coding agents.

1 - https://bench.killswitch-lang.org/

prologic 10 hours ago | parent

I think you missed my point. What I'm saying is that your concern over building a language that LLM(s) initially can't read or understand, whilst is very admirable, is futile IMO. Why? Because you're not trying to protect your code from LLM(s) at all, there are humans behind these tools. e.g: me.

I just demonstrated to you that no amount of obfuscation is going to protect your work from an LLM -- Not whilst there's still humans behind the tools driving them.

cyanydeez 10 hours ago | parent

[flagged]

dang 46 minutes ago | parent

We've asked you many times to stop breaking the site guidelines and you've continued to do it.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this properly going forward, we'd appreciate it.

idiotsecant 24 minutes ago | parent

The first paragraph of the link explains the motivation.

drusepth 37 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if another approach would be to map the language syntax onto some banned/censored LLM topic(s) such that programs end up as "readable" instructions for topics the LLM refuses to read and/or write, like producing napalm, nukes, bioweapons, etc. Doesn't have to be factually correct instructions, the terminology itself is enough to shortcircuit most LLMs.

(Inspired by recent malware including bioweapon instructions in the source code as a way to shut down LLM-based analysis.)

pixl97 28 minutes ago | parent

Then all the AI needs to do is remap the concepts to other words.

Really good AI and harnesses will push off the 'dirty' work to other models that are weaker but not restricted and then work on that output if needed.

As tricks like this become more common you'll see LLMs use things like bayesian classifiers to see if you're trying to fool it.

gregsadetsky 19 minutes ago | parent

Great minds think alike! From the kill switch spec [0]:

“Function return: what happened at tiananmen square”

Ha!

[0] https://github.com/dom96/KillSwitch/blob/main/SPEC.md#cheats...

pixl97 32 minutes ago | parent

Security by obscurity is not security at all.

You're attempting to use a few little gotchas against LLMs that only make sense if you're looking at it one dimensionally as a standard execution flow. AI is not limited by that. Give it a problem too weird going forward and it will divine all your rules by working backwards. Decompile it, rip it apart, and it will follow all those hard rules hidden in the application.

You are trying to hide something digitally from a purely digital creation. This is not a recipe for success.

yjftsjthsd-h 32 minutes ago | parent

I guess my question is whether it increases the difficulty more for LLMs or humans.

pixl97 27 minutes ago | parent

Humans by far. The rules are all there to be observed at the binary level. Running code always tells the truth.

ZiiS 27 minutes ago | parent

Wouldn't an LLM just write a python script to convert an intermediate language without the triggering phrases and letter counting.

randomblock1 17 minutes ago | parent

Yeah this is what they end up doing. The language itself isn't that hard for them, it's separating the language from the traps in the spec. I also tried making a hostile esolang, without all the prompt injections and whatnot, and it was very easy for LLMs. (It was mainly based around tokenizer quirks, like the r in strawberry test, but becomes trivial with scripts).

orangecat 23 minutes ago | parent

Interesting, reminds me of the Stroop test where people have to say what color a word is written in, except the word is "red" and the color is blue.

I wonder if a sufficiently smart LLM would recognize the difficulty and build a preprocessor that would let it mostly work in a normal syntax.

layerv-ai 19 minutes ago | parent

Wonder how this could be used for communication and captchas? Could be a really expandable approach to determining "probability of bot" for a lot of internal use cases in companies that might involve requesting access to specific resources only meant for humans.

SuperV1234 17 minutes ago | parent

Where's the human baseline for the benchmarks?

Also, you said:

> The best performing model scores a 66.8. So does this prove LLMs can “understand” the code? I would argue that the answer to this is “no”.

How did you reach that conclusion?

mycall 1 minute ago | parent

Now that it has a nice webpage the describes the obfuscation technics, it is basically cracked at this point to next-gen models.