I Wrote a Python Interpreter in Python. What I Learned Has Nothing to Do With Python

150 points on Hacker News. That number stopped my scroll at 11pm on a Tuesday. The title was simple: "Writing a Python interpreter in Python" . I opened it expecting another toy tutorial. I closed my laptop at 2am having written a lexer, a parser, and a working evaluator — and with a question I didn't see coming: why do I now have a better feel for when Claude is lying to me? That's what this post is about. Python Interpreter in Python: The Entry Point The original post is solid. The core idea i