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We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

anthropic.com

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Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#141

Post by zamadatix »

modeless wrote: post #31
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #19

This is a much more reasonable take than the cursor-browser thing. A few things that make it pretty impressive: > This was a clean-room implementation (Claude did not have internet access at any point during its development); it depends only on the Rust standard library. The 100,000-line compiler can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. It can also compile QEMU, FFmpeg, SQlite, postgres, redis > I started by draf…

There seem to still be a lot of people who look at results like this and evaluate them purely based on the current state. I don't know how you can look at this and not realize that it represents a huge improvement over just a few months ago, there have been continuous improvements for many years now, and there is no reason to believe progress is stopping here. If you project out just one year, even assuming progress…

The improvements in tool use and agentic loops have been fast and furious lately, delivering great results. The model growth itself is feeling more "slow and linear" lately, but what you can do with models as part of an overall system has been increasing in growth rate and that has been delivering a lot of value. It matters less if the model natively can keep infinite context or figure things out on its own in one shot so long as it can orchestrate external tools to achieve that over time.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#142

Post by NitpickLawyer »

nozzlegear wrote: post #131
modeless wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to still be a lot of people who look at results like this and evaluate them purely based on the current state. I don't know how you can look at this and not realize that it represents a huge improvement over just a few months ago, there have been continuous improvements for many years now, and there is no reason to believe progress is stopping here. If you project out just one year, even assuming progress…

Every S-curve looks like an exponential until you hit the bend.

We've been hearing this for 3 years now. And especially 25 was full of "they've hit a wall, no more data, running out of data, plateau this, saturated that". And yet, here we are. Models keep on getting better, at more broad tasks, and more useful by the month.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#143

Post by delusional »

Retr0id wrote: post #138
201984 wrote: post #125

https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1

Looks like these users are just missing glibc-devel or equivalent?

Naa, it looks like it's failing to include the standard system include directories. If you take then from gcc and pass them as -I, it'll compile.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#145

Post by teaearlgraycold »

inchargeoncall wrote: post #136
geraneum wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was a clean-room implementation This is really pushing it, considering it’s trained on… internet, with all available c compilers. The work is already impressive enough, no need for such misleading statements.

[flagged]

With just a few thousand dollars of API credits you too can inefficiently download a lossy copy of a C compiler!

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#146

Post by Retr0id »

delusional wrote: post #143
Retr0id wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like these users are just missing glibc-devel or equivalent?

Naa, it looks like it's failing to include the standard system include directories. If you take then from gcc and pass them as -I, it'll compile.

Can confirm (on aarch64 host)

    $ ./target/release/ccc-arm -I /usr/include/ -I /usr/local/include/ -I /usr/lib/gcc/aarch64-redhat-linux/15/include/ -o hello hello.c 

    $ ./hello
    Hello from CCC!

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#147

Post by simonw »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #25
7734128 wrote: post #17

I'm sure this is impressive, but it's probably not the best test case given how many C compilers there are out there and how they presumably have been featured in the training data. This is almost like asking me to invent a path finding algorithm when I've been thought Dijkstra's and A*.

It's a bit disappointing that people are still re-hashing the same "it's in the training data" old thing from 3 years ago. It's not like any LLM could 1for1 regurgitate millions of LoC from any training set... This is not how it works. A pertinent quote from the article (which is a really nice read, I'd recommend reading it fully at least once): > Previous Opus 4 models were barely capable of producing a functional c…

This is a good rebuttal to the "it was in the training data" argument - if that's how this stuff works, why couldn't Opus 4.5 or any of the other previous models achieve the same thing?

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#148

Post by raincole »

nozzlegear wrote: post #131
modeless wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to still be a lot of people who look at results like this and evaluate them purely based on the current state. I don't know how you can look at this and not realize that it represents a huge improvement over just a few months ago, there have been continuous improvements for many years now, and there is no reason to believe progress is stopping here. If you project out just one year, even assuming progress…

Every S-curve looks like an exponential until you hit the bend.

This quote would be more impactful if people haven't been repeating it since gpt-4 time.

Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler

#149

Post by dwaltrip »

krupan wrote: post #129
minimaxir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it leads to poor and nonconstructive discourse that doesn't educate anyone about the implications of the tech, which is expected on social media but has annoyingly leaked to Hacker News. There's been more than enough drive-by comments from new accounts/green names even in this HN submission alone.

It does lead to poor non-constructive discourse. That's why we keep calling those CEOs to task on it. Why are you not?

The CEOs aren't here in the comments.
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