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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

#31

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 stops after that, the implications are staggering.

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

#32

How about we get the LLM's to collaborate and design a perfect programming language for LLM coding, it would be terse (less tokens) easy for pattern searches etc and very fast to build, iterate over.

I'm surprised by the assumption that LLMs would design such a language better than humans. I don't think that's the case.

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

#35

How about we get the LLM's to collaborate and design a perfect programming language for LLM coding, it would be terse (less tokens) easy for pattern searches etc and very fast to build, iterate over.

I cannot decide if LLMs would be excellent at writing in pure binary (why waste all that context on superfluous variable names and function symbols) or be absolutely awful at writing pure binary (would get hopelessly lost without the huge diversification of tokens).

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

#36

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…

> 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.

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

#37
post #29
post #26

> 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, and has a 99% pass rate on most compiler test suites including the GCC torture test suite. It also passes the developer's ultimate…

Interesting how the concept of a clean room implementation changes when the agent has been trained on the entire internet already

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

#38

Can it create employment? How is this making life better. I understand the achievement but come on, wouldn´t it be something to show if you created employment for 10000 people using your 20000 USD! Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, all solving the wrong problems, your problems not the collective ones.

"Employment" is not intrinsically valuable. It is an emergent property of one way of thinking about economic systems.

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

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, if you do not care to optimize, yes. source: done it

I would love to see the commit log on this.

Implementing just enough to conform to a language is not as difficult as it seems. Making it fast is hard.
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