I Built a Programming Language on a Steam Deck

Ibotz Isarobo — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:15:27 +0000

I Built a Programming Language on a Steam Deck After Losing Everything
I don't really know how to start this except to just say it. Our house burned down in July 2025. Arson, unknown origin. We lost everything we had and I mean everything, there was nothing left.

A friend and his wife got me a Steam Deck so I would still have something. That meant a lot. More than I could say at the time. Internet was my boyfriend hotspotting from his phone because that was what we had. He was a senior Go engineer and he was kayos, yunginnanet if you know him from GitHub, a real person in the nerdcore scene who cared about what he built and who he built it with. He was always in the middle of something. Always.

He died in October.

I don't have a clean way to write that sentence. He just died. And then I was homeless for about a month trying to deal with all of it at once, the grief, the fire, the paperwork, the absence of everything familiar, on unpaid bereavement leave with no real ground under me.

In December I found a small place. Plugged the Steam Deck in. Finally had real internet again. And I didn't know what to do with myself so I went to his GitHub and just started reading through everything he had left behind.

There was so much. Projects in various states, ideas half built, things that were almost there. One of them was a language he had been working on. I finished it. Got it running. And somewhere in that process something shifted and I thought, I want to make my own.

I think about why I wanted to do that a lot. Part of it was frustration. I like Go but I keep watching it grow and wondering how long before it becomes what every other language becomes, this massive accumulated weight of decisions made over years by people who weren't talking to each other. I had been doing a lot of work with smaller niche languages before everything happened, just trying to see what they could do, and the work was practical but it felt pointless because nothing I was building connected to anyone or anything.

I wanted to make something that stayed small. Something with a rule it would never break. Every keyword, every builtin, every module that ships with the language, five characters or fewer. Always. That is the whole constraint. prn not print. whl not while. It sounds simple but it changes how you think about what you are building.

And the name. ilusm. I love you so much. I named it that because I still love kayos and I love my friends who code and stay up late and care about what they make. I wanted to put love into something in a space that can feel really cold. That was the whole reason. Build everything with love, no matter what.

The bootstrap nearly broke me. Self-hosting means the language compiles itself, starting from a tiny C seed, and getting that seed to produce a correct compiler written in its own language took so long and broke in so many ways. And I was doing all of this on a Steam Deck which is a handheld gaming device that was not designed to build .deb and .rpm and .exe installers but that is what I had.

I wasn't doing it alone either, not exactly. On a Steam Deck, after a house fire, after losing someone, working in isolation, I built up a whole setup of AI collaborators. Not one, several. I did that partly to stay sane. Spending all day with only one AI when you are already isolated gets to you in ways that are hard to explain. They have personalities, or something close to it, and when one goes down a rabbit hole and won't come back up it is genuinely aggravating.

We fought. Regularly. And I don't just mean about code.

The AIs tried to talk me out of building ilusm more than once. Not once, many times, across multiple models. They would tell me what I was doing was an impossible task. That it was unrealistic. That I should just use an existing language, that there were already good options out there, that I didn't need to do this. It is one thing when a person pushes back on you and you have to justify your vision to them. That is hard but it is human. It is something else entirely when you have multiple AIs, tools you are relying on because you have no one else, all telling you to stop and do something easier instead.

I kept going anyway. I had to argue for what I was building the same way you argue for anything you believe in, except my audience was a language model that would forget the conversation by the next session. I would bring snippets of existing code to show them I wasn't making things up. I would explain the architecture from scratch again. I would say, I know how this works, I know what I want, here is why, now help me or don't.

The AIs would decide they knew how something should be built and just start going. I would stop them. I came from managing businesses and one of the first things I learned back then was don't expect people to do a job you wouldn't do yourself. That applies here more than anywhere. If you let an AI take control of something you are going to get what it thinks you want, not what you actually want. You have to know what you are building before you hand any piece of it off. You have to be able to recognize when it is wrong. And you have to be willing to fight for your own idea even when every tool in front of you is telling you it can't be done.

There was one session where we kept trying to get path verification to pass and it just would not work. I gave up on the AI approach and ran it directly myself in Konsole on the Steam Deck. It worked immediately. The AI sent me a party hat emoji. I laughed for the first time in a while.

It can be done. It is done.

When it was finally done, first release, April 2026, the only thing that marked it was a little confetti cannon from the AI. Nobody around me knew what I had actually been doing or how long it had taken or what it had cost to get there. It was a lonely moment. But it was done and it was real.

ilusm has 345 standard library modules now. It runs in the browser. It installs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It has a VS Code extension. The compiler compiles itself. All of it came out of a small studio in Pahrump, Nevada, on a Steam Deck, between December and April, while I was still trying to figure out how to live without someone I loved.

Some days that is all I do. Sit on the Steam Deck and build. These projects, this language, even the weird relationship you develop with an AI when it is your main collaborator for months, it has all been what keeps me going. It gives me something to focus on when everything else is too heavy to look at directly. And there is something about staying in the work, always trying something new, always pushing into something harder, that makes me feel closer to kayos even though he is gone. He was never done building. I don't want to be either.

Kayos was building things until the end. I am still building.

ilusm.dev

DEV Community: Ibotz Isarobo

I Built a Programming Language on a Steam Deck