First.BETA

An architect's programming language.Designed for idea capture and gradualtransitioning into highly engineered code.

First replaces the specification and sets the stage for LLMs to write dramatically better code. For engineers who care about quality, long-term durability, and creating greatness.

See The Docs

Design What Matters.
Delegate The Rest.

LLMs gave architects the opportunity to work almost exclusively on the important things: arranging elegant abstractions, designing data flow, and shaping objects.

But somewhere along the line, that work degraded into markdown slop. First relocates that thinking into a code-shaped form, where the critical parts are immediately visible.

AppModel.first

Replier (
	Frontend (
		Dashboard (
			- Present reply opportunities as a scrolling list.
			- Keep active editing in place when captures arrive.
		)
	)
)

ReplyComposer.first

ReplyComposer (
	Draft (
		- Preserve the writer's intent.
		- Suggest concise alternatives.
		- Explain risk before rewriting tone.
	)
)

CaptureFlow.first

CaptureFlow (
	Intent (
		- Detect posts worth answering.
		- Rank by relationship and urgency.
		- Hand low-risk wording to the agent.
	)
)

ReplyReview.first

ReplyReview (
	Checks (
		- Flag claims that need evidence.
		- Keep humor below the user's risk limit.
		- Prefer clarity over cleverness.
	)
)

InboxModel.first

InboxModel (
	Signals (
		- Group replies by conversation.
		- Hide stale opportunities.
		- Surface people the user knows first.
	)
)

AgentBoundary.first

AgentBoundary (
	Permission (
		- Draft freely inside the composer.
		- Ask before posting.
		- Record why a suggestion changed.
	)
)

Criticality Partitioning Is The Cheat Code

First is in the early stages. Today, you can shape a system in First and have an LLM implement it in Swift or TypeScript. It's already better than Markdown.

But First is built around a deeper idea: partition the structure of a system into layers of criticality. Specify the load bearing parts at higher levels of criticality, and hand the less consequential parts over to the LLM.

You decide where that handoff occurs. As First grows, more of those layers can be written in First, until your entire codebase is written in First, and mechanically compiled into TypeScript, Swift, or other languages.

Load Bearing First
System Shape First + Agent
Implementation Detail LLM
Low-Risk Surface LLM

You Suspiciously Already Know First

First is designed to be read cold.

No tutorial. No syntax guide. No gentle introduction. You open an unfamiliar file and, somehow, you're reading and comprehending what it's describing. That feeling has taken two years.

And crucially, that legibility is now existential. New languages now enter a world with almost no training data. First is designed so that humans and agents can speak it with little to no prior training.

Check Out The Replier Sample App

As a test project, we're using First to build Replier, an open-source growth tool that helps you write better replies on X.

GitHub Follow Paul On X