Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 787 posts

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

#41

Post by skydhash »

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…

Because for all those projects, the effective solution is to just use the existing implementation and not launder code through an LLM. We would rather see a stab at fixing CVEs or implementing features in open source projects. Like the wifi situation in FreeBSD.

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

#42

Post by falcor84 »

btown wrote: 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…

Agreed, but the next step is of having an AI agent actually run the business and be able to get the business context it needs as a human would. Obviously we're not quite there, but with the rapid progress on benchmarks like Vending-Bench [0], and especially with this teams approach, it doesn't seem far fetched anymore.

As a particular near-term step, I imagine that it won't be long before we see a SaaS company using an AI product manager, which can spawn agents to directly interview users as they utilize the app, independently propose and (after getting approval) run small product experiments, and come up with validated recommendations for changing the product roadmap. I still remember Tay, and wouldn't give something like that the keys to the kingdom any time soon, but as long as there's a human decision maker at the end, I think that the tech is already here.

[0] https://andonlabs.com/evals/vending-bench-2

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

#44

Post by gmueckl »

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…

The result is hardly a clean room implementation. It was rather a brute force attempt to decompress fuzzily stored knowledge contained within the network and it required close steering (using a big suite of tests) to get a reasonable approximation to the desired output. The compression and storage happened during the LLM training.

Prove this statement wrong.

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

#46

Post by ben_w »

dmitrygr wrote: post #4

> The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled. Worse than "-O0" takes skill... So then, it produced something much worse than tcc (which is better than gcc -O0), an equivalent of which one man can produce in under two weeks. So even all those tokens and dollars did not equal one man's week of work. Except the on…

I'm trying to recall a quote. Some war where all defeats were censored in the news, possibly Paris was losing to someone. It was something along the lines of "I can't help but notice how our great victories keep getting closer to home".

Last year I tried using an LLM to make a joke language, I couldn't even compile the compiler the source code was so bad. Before Christmas, same joke language, a previous version of Claude gave me something that worked. I wouldn't call it "good", it was a joke language, but it did work.

So it sucks at writing a compiler? Yay. The gloriously indefatigable human mind wins another battle against the mediocre AI, but I can't help but notice how the battles keep getting closer to home.

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

#47

Post by jcalvinowens »

How much of this result is effectively plagiarized open source compiler code? I don't understand how this is compelling at all: obviously it can regurgitate things that are nearly identical in capability to already existing code it was explicitly trained on...

It's very telling how all these examples are all "look, we made it recreate a shitter version of a thing that already exists in the training set".

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

#48

Post by modeless »

skydhash wrote: post #41
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because for all those projects, the effective solution is to just use the existing implementation and not launder code through an LLM. We would rather see a stab at fixing CVEs or implementing features in open source projects. Like the wifi situation in FreeBSD.

They are doing that too. https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/

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

#49

Post by zephen »

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…

> 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.

They only have to keep reiterating this because people are still pretending the training data doesn't contain all the information that it does.

> It's not like any LLM could 1for1 regurgitate millions of LoC from any training set... This is not how it works.

Maybe not any old LLM, but Claude gets really close.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671v1

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

#50

Post by anematode »

WarmWash wrote: post #35
small_model wrote: post #9

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).

Binary is wayyy less information dense than normal code, so it wouldn't work well at all.
Post reply on HN