UK — The Register
Michigan prof creates Python-like Jac language for AI agents
AI1 min read
A University of Michigan professor has built Jac, a new programming language that looks like Python. It is meant to work with many other languages, and it is designed to help AI agents do their jobs. The story was reported from the All Things Open conference.
A new language for AI agents
Professor Jason Mars has created a language called Jac and a runtime (the software that runs code) called Jaseci. Both treat AI and AI agents as main parts of the system, not as add-ons. He showed them in a talk at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Key facts
- Jarred Sumner, creator of the Bun framework, spent $165,000 in Anthropic tokens (units of AI usage that cost money) to turn Bun's Zig code into Rust.
- Jac is a Python-like language that works with both the TypeScript and Python tools.
- Jac can use libraries from the PyPI (Python) and npm (JavaScript) collections.
- Jac can also import C and C++ libraries. Java is not supported.
Why programmers are switching languages
Most programming tools were built for people to use, before AI agents existed. Mars says agents now get stuck moving data between many languages. That translation work costs a lot of AI usage. Jac tries to solve this by being one language that can gobble up many others.
Why it matters
If Mars is right, AI agents could do software work more cheaply and with less effort. Jac also stores data as a graph, with nodes for things and edges for the links between them. This could save agents from doing many extra steps to read data from different places. It is still an academic idea, so its real value will depend on how people use it.
What to watch
- Whether other developers start using Jac and Jaseci outside of university work.
- How well the eject function works when companies need code in TypeScript, Python, or C.
- Whether the graph-based way of storing data proves cheaper for AI agents in real projects.
Glossary
- Jac
- A new Python-like programming language that can work with many other languages and tools.
- Jaseci
- The runtime, or software that runs programs, made for the Jac language.
- Bun
- A JavaScript framework and toolkit whose code was converted from Zig to Rust in this story.
- Anthropic
- An AI company whose tokens (AI usage units) were used in the Bun conversion.
- PyPI
- The main online library collection for the Python programming language.