Claude copilot powers Rue, a new memory-safe systems language

Rue is interesting less as yet another systems language and more as a case study in what happens when an experienced engineer treats an LLM as a true co‑author on a complex compiler. Klabnik reports that starting over with Claude as his main collaborator got him further in two weeks than months of solo work, with the model producing the bulk of the code and even summarizing project progress in its own blog posts. That’s a qualitatively different pattern from autocomplete or Copilot‑style suggestion; it’s closer to handing architectural intent to an AI and letting it explore the design space.([theregister.com](https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/03/claude_copilot_rue_steve_klabnik/))

If this workflow generalizes, it accelerates the meta‑layer of the race to AGI: language, tooling, and infrastructure can be iterated much faster by small teams using AI copilots. That compounds the leverage of frontier labs like Anthropic, whose models not only do downstream tasks but also help build the next generation of runtimes, compilers, and agents that will train and operate more advanced systems. It also raises new questions about provenance and verification—when your compiler is mostly written by a model trained on unknown codebases, traditional notions of authorship and code review need rethinking.