KIRHA

Coding agents are transforming software engineering. They no longer just autocomplete code: they plan, write, execute, and collaborate over increasingly long horizons. On July 20, Cursor showed what this looks like at scale, with a swarm of agents rebuilding SQLite in Rust from its 835-page manual [ 1 ] .

Yet one major programming language has been left behind by this new paradigm: SAS. The proprietary technology has dominated regulated industries for decades and still accounts for 68% of clinical statistical programming [ 2 ] .

An agent can write SAS, but without programmatic access to a runtime, it cannot execute, test, or correct the programs it produces. That breaks the feedback loop that makes coding agents effective.

Introducing OpenSAS : an open-source, SAS 9.4-compatible interpreter written in Zig. For supported programs, it produces byte-for-byte compatible output with SAS across complete production pipelines. At the time of writing, OpenSAS is 87,795 lines of Zig across 3,548 commits , all generated by coding agents. It is backed by 829 unit tests , 1,835 conformance tests against a corpus of expected SAS 9.4 outputs, and two end-to-end real-world clinical programs, including complete SDTM and ADaM pipelines.