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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

#231

Post by cermicelli »

benjiro wrote: post #180
Havoc wrote: post #121

Cool project, but they really could have skipped the mention of clean room. Something trained on every copyrighted thing known to mankind is the opposite of clean room

Hot take: If you try to reimplement something in a clean room, its a step by step process, using your own accumulated knowledge as the basis. That knowledge that you hold in your brain, all too often is code that may have copyrights on it, from the companies you worked on. Is it any different for a LLM? The fact that the LLM is trained on more data, does not change that when you work for a company, leave it, take tha…

If you have worked on a related copyrighted work you can't work on a clean room implementation. You will be sued. There are lots of people who have tried and found out.

They weren't trillion dollar AI companies to bankroll the defense sure. But thinking about clean room and using copyrighted stuff is not even an argument that's just nonsense to try to prove something when no one asked.

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

#232

Post by ndesaulniers »

underdeserver wrote: post #201
phillmv wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean… your work also went into the training set, so it's not entirely surprising that it spat a version back out!

Anthropic's version is in Rust though, so at least a little different.

There's parts of LLVM architecture that are long in the tooth (IMO) (as is the language it's implemented in, IMO).

I had hoped one day to re-implement parts of LLVM itself in Rust; in particular, I've been curious if we can concurrently compile C (and parse C in parallel, or lazily) that haven't been explored in LLVM, and I think might be safer to do in Rust. I don't know enough about grammers to know if it's technically impossible, but a healthy dose of ignorance can sometimes lead to breakthroughs.

LLVM is pretty well designed for test. I was able to implement a lexer for C in Rust that could lex the Linux kernel, and use clang to cross check my implementation (I would compare my interpretation of the token stream against clang's). Just having a standard module system makes having reusable pieces seems like perhaps a better way to compose a toolchain, but maybe folks with more experience with rustc have scars to disagree?

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

#233

Post by rishabhaiover »

hmry wrote: post #224

If I, a human, read the source code of $THING and then later implement my own version, that's not a "clean-room" re-implementation. The whole point of "clean-room" is that no single person has access to both the original code and the new code. (That way, you can legally prove that no copyright infringement took place.) But when an AI does it, now it counts? Opus is trained on the source code of Clang, GCC, TCC, etc.…

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

#234

Post by regularfry »

cheema33 wrote: post #210
Havoc wrote: post #121

Cool project, but they really could have skipped the mention of clean room. Something trained on every copyrighted thing known to mankind is the opposite of clean room

As others have pointed out, humans train on existing codebases as well. And then use that knowledge to build clean room implementations.

What they don't do is read the product they're clean-rooming. That's kinda disqualifying. Impossible to know if the GCC source is in 4.6's training set but it would be kinda weird if it wasn't.

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

#235

Post by [deleted] »

fmbb wrote: post #226
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> And yet, here we are. I dunno. To me it doesn’t even look exponential any more. We are at most on the straight part of the incline.

[deleted]

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

#236

Post by karmakaze »

I'm not particularly impressed that it can turn C into an SSA IR or assembly etc. The optimizations, however sophisticated is where anything impressive would be. Then again, we have lots of examples in the training set I would expect. C compilers are probably the most popular of all compilers. What would be more impressive is for it to have made a compiler for a well defined language that isn't very close to a popular language.

What I am impressed by is that the task it completed had many steps and the agent didn't get lost or caught in a loop in the many sessions and time it spent doing it.

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

#237

Post by simonw »

dyauspitr wrote: post #194
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…

> Claude did not have internet access at any point during its development Why is this even desirable? I want my LLM to take into account everything there is out there and give me the best possible output.

It's desirable if you're trying to build a C compiler as a demo of coding agent capabilities without all of the Hacker News commenters saying "yeah but it could just copy implementation details from the internet".

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

#238

Post by pizlonator »

cheema33 wrote: post #210
Havoc wrote: post #121

Cool project, but they really could have skipped the mention of clean room. Something trained on every copyrighted thing known to mankind is the opposite of clean room

As others have pointed out, humans train on existing codebases as well. And then use that knowledge to build clean room implementations.

Not the same.

I have read nowhere near as much code (or anything) as what Claude has to read to get to where it is.

And I can write an optimizing compiler that isn't slower than GCC -O0

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

#240

Post by regularfry »

whinvik wrote: post #12

It's weird to see the expectation that the result should be perfect. All said and done, that its even possible is remarkable. Maybe these all go into training the next Opus or Sonnet and we start getting models that can create efficient compilers from scratch. That would be something!

This is firmly where I am. "The wonder is not how well the dog dances, it is that it dances at all."
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