Sometimes when you build software, you shave a yak so deeply that you end up with a surprisingly nice sweater (while the yak, presumably, wonders why it is suddenly rather drafty). For the past while, my team and I have been building a quantum compiler called Catalyst for the quantum software library PennyLane. Our goal was relatively straightforward: optimize large, hybrid quantum-classical workflows in a scalable manner using MLIR. To do this, we needed a fast, robust way to capture classical ...