191–200 of 377 posts
"The miracle is not that the bear can dance well, it's that the bear can dance at all." - Old Russian proverb.
But the poster, the ticket seller, and the ringmaster all said "Anna Pavlova reincarnated, a Bear that can dance as well as famous Ice Skaters!"
By evaluating the objective (successful compilation) in a loop, the LLM effectively narrows the problem space. This is why the code compiles even when the broader logic remains unfinished/incorrect.
It’s a good example of how LLMs navigate complex, non-linear spaces by extracting optimal patterns from their training data. It’s amazing.
p.s. if you translate all this to marketing jargon, it’ll become “our LLM wrote a compiler by itself with a clean room setup”.
Edit: typo
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do I know that? The code is not similar to GCC at any level except conceptual. If you can point out the similarity at any level I might agree with you.
I have a feeling, you didn't look at the code at all.
We act so superior to LLMs but I'm very unimpressed with humanity at this stage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! > Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro-LLM: Read the freaking article, it's not that long. The compiler made a mistake in an area where only two compilers exist that are up to the task: Linux Kernel.
Anthropic said they vibe-coded a C compiler that could compile the Linux kernel. That's what they said. No-one forced them to say that. They could have picked another code base. It turns out that isn't true in all instances, as this article demonstrates. I'm not nearly expert enough to be able to decide if that error was simple, stupid, irrelevant, or whatever. I can make a call on whether it successfully compiled th…
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
That's a really nice fictitious conversation but in my experience "anti-ai" people would be prone to say "This is stupid LLM's will never be able to write complex code and attempting to do so is futile". If your mind is open to explore how LLM's will actually write complex software then by definition you are not "anti".
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
> it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless.
It works. It's not perfect, but anthropic claims to have successfully compiled and booted 3 different configurations with it. The blog post failed to reproduce one specific version on one specific architecture. I wish anthropic gave us more information about which kernel commits succeeded, but still. Compare this to years that it took for clang to compile the kernel, yet people were not calling that compiler useless.
If anyone thinks other compilers "just work", I invite them to start fixing packages that fail to build in nixos after every major compiler change, to get a dose of real world experience.
As a neutral observation: it’s remarkable how quickly we as humans adjust expectations. Imagine five years ago saying that you could have a general purpose AI write a c compiler that can handle the Linux kernel, by itself, from scratch for $20k by writing a simple English prompt. That would have been completely unbelievable! Absurd! No one would take it seriously. And now look at where we are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two thoughts here: First, remember when we had LLMs run optimisation passes last year? Alphaevolve doing square packing, and optimising ML kernels? The "anti" crowd was like "well, of course it can automatically optimise some code, that's easy". And things like "wake me up when it does hard tasks". Now, suddenly when they do hard tasks, we're back at "haha, but it's unoptimised and slow, laaame". Second, if you could…
You're heavily implying that because it can do this task, it can do any task at this difficulty or lower. Wrong. This thing isn't a human at the level of writing a compiler, and shouldn't be compared to one Codex frustratingly failed at refactoring my tests for me the other day, despite me trying many, many prompts of increasing specificity. A task a junior could've done Am I saying "haha it couldn't do a junior leve…
Burn everything, because if you don’t, you will get left behind and, maybe, just maybe, in 2 years when it’s good enough, maybe… after hoovering up all the money, IP and domain expertise for free, and you’ve burnt all your money & sanity prompting and cajoling it to a semi working solution for a problem you didn’t really have in the first place, it will dump you at the back of the unemployment line. All hail the AI! Crazy times.
In the meantime please enjoy targeted scams, ever increasing energy prices, AI content farms, hardware shortages, and endless, endless slop.
When humans architect anything - ideas, buildings, software or ice cream sundaes, we make so many little decisions that affect the overall outcome, we don’t even know or think about it! Too many sprinkles and sauce and it will be too sweet and hard to eat. We make those decisions based on both experience and imagination. Watch a small child making one to see the perfect human intersection of these two things at play. The LLM totally lacks the imagination part, except in the worst possible ways. It’s experience includes all sorts of random internet garbage that can sound highly convincing even to domain experts. Now it’s training set is being further expanded with endless mountains of more highly impressive sounding garbage.
It was obvious to me with the first image gen models how incredibly impressive it was to see an image gradually forming from the computer based on nothing but my brief text input but also how painfully limited the technology would always be. After days and days of early obsessive image generation, I was no better as an artist than when I began! Everything also kind of looked the same as well?
As incredible as it was, it was nothing more than a massively complicated, highly advanced parlour trick. A futuristic, highly powerful pattern generator. Nothing has changed my mind at all. All that’s happened is we’ve seen the worst tricksters, shysters and con artists jump on a very dangerous bandwagon to hell and try and whip us less compliant souls onboard.
Lots of things follow patterns, the joy in life, for me, is discovering the patterns, exploring them and developing new unique and interesting patterns.
I’ve yet to encounter a bandwagon worth joining anyway, maybe this will be the one that leaves me behind and i’ll be forced to retire on cartoon gorilla NFTs and tulip farming?
That’s the whole promise to reach AGI that it will be able to improve itself.
I think Anthropic ruined this by releasing it too early would have been way more fun to have seen a live website where you can see it iterating and the progress is making.