--- title: I Built a Tiny Computer Inside a Transformer | daily.dev description: A hands-on exploration of treating a transformer as a programmable machine rather than a trained system. By assigning hidden-state dimensions to program... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-a-tiny-computer-inside-a-transformer-onwjlebem twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: I Built a Tiny Computer Inside a Transformer | daily.dev og:description: A hands-on exploration of treating a transformer as a programmable machine rather than a trained system. By assigning hidden-state dimensions to program... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-a-tiny-computer-inside-a-transformer-onwjlebem og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/oNwJLEbEM.png og:image:alt: I Built a Tiny Computer Inside a Transformer og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # I Built a Tiny Computer Inside a Transformer **[Towards Data Science](https://daily.dev/sources/tds)** · 18 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A hands-on exploration of treating a transformer as a programmable machine rather than a trained system. By assigning hidden-state dimensions to program variables (like CPU registers), wiring attention heads as deterministic lookup tables, and using feed-forward blocks as local compute units, a simple program can be compiled directly into transformer weights without any gradient descent. The residual stream acts as working memory, each layer as a machine step, and slot reuse mirrors register allocation in traditional compilers. The post also discusses geometric speedups for attention lookups via convex-hull structures, and references Percepta's work on compiling a WebAssembly VM into transformer weights for practical deterministic execution inside LLMs. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Can LLMs Be Computers?](https://daily.dev/posts/can-llms-be-computers--wuueagzci) · Hacker News · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [Fundamentals of AI: Inside the transformer](https://daily.dev/posts/fundamentals-of-ai-inside-the-transformer-szwloqlw1) · Cisco · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Building GPT from Scratch: What I Learned Implementing a Transformer in Raw PyTorch](https://daily.dev/posts/building-gpt-from-scratch-what-i-learned-implementing-a-transformer-in-raw-pytorch-janzjl2vo) · Medium · 3 upvotes · 0 comments - [Training A Transformer With 1970s-era Technology](https://daily.dev/posts/training-a-transformer-with-1970s-era-technology-52ey3ug4p) · Hackaday · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#compiler](https://daily.dev/tags/compiler) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-a-tiny-computer-inside-a-transformer-onwjlebem) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"I Built a Tiny Computer Inside a Transformer","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-a-tiny-computer-inside-a-transformer-onwjlebem","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-a-tiny-computer-inside-a-transformer-onwjlebem"},"datePublished":"2026-04-13T12:56:02.903Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T13:03:39.611Z","description":"A hands-on exploration of treating a transformer as a programmable machine rather than a trained system. 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