Earlier quoted context omitted.
A compiler that can build linux. That level of quality should be sufficient. Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX? No you don't. They do not exist.
Yep. Building a working C compiler that compiles Linux is an impossible task for all but the top 1% of developers. And the ones that could do it have better things to do, plus they’d want a lot more than 20K for the trouble.
We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
501–510 of 787 posts
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#502My question would be: what are the myriad other projects you tasked Opus 4.6 to build and it could not get to a point you could kinda-sorta make a post about?
This kind of headline makes me think of p-hacking.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
A compiler that can build linux. That level of quality should be sufficient. Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX? No you don't. They do not exist.
Yep. Building a working C compiler that compiles Linux is an impossible task for all but the top 1% of developers. And the ones that could do it have better things to do, plus they’d want a lot more than 20K for the trouble.
Interesting, why impossible? We studied compiler construction at uni. I might have to dig out a few books, but I’m confident I could write one. I can’t imagine anyone on my course of 120 nerds being unable to do this.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#504honestly i am amazed that it can do that, but I wish they use it to rewrite the claude code cli. i had to killall -9 claude 3 times yesterday
They are already writing Claude with Claude - I think they said 90% of their code is written with Claude.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely detached from reality, brainwashed SV VC's who have made dumping the norm in their bubble. I can guarantee you that 90% of successful businesses in the world made a profit their first year.
I’ll bite. Share your data? Companies that were not profitable in their first year: Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, airBnB, Uber, Apple, FedEx, Amazon. If the vast majority of companies are immediately profitable, why do we have VC and investment at all? Shouldn’t the founders just start making money right aeay?
> Companies that were not profitable in their first year: Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, airBnB, Uber, Apple, FedEx, Amazon.
US Big Tech, US Big Tech, US Tech-adjacent, US Big Tech, US Big Tech, US Big Tech, FedEx, US Tech-adjacent.
In other words, exactly what I was getting at.
Also, a basic search shows Microsoft to have been profitable first year. I'd be very surprised if they weren't. Apple also seems to have taken less than 2 years. And unsurprisingly, these happen to be the only two among the tech companies you named that launched before 1995.
Check out the Forbes Global 5000. Then go think about the hypothetical Forbes Global 50,000. Is the 50,000th most successful company in the world not successful? Of course not, it's incredibly successful.
> why do we have VC and investment at all
Out of all companies started in 2024 I can guarantee you that <0.01% have received VC investment by now (Feb 2026) and <1% of tech companies did. I'll bet my house on it.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#506honestly i am amazed that it can do that, but I wish they use it to rewrite the claude code cli. i had to killall -9 claude 3 times yesterday
They are already writing Claude with Claude - I think they said 90% of their code is written with Claude.
yes, they must be killing it hundreds of times per day, maybe its time for 'please rewrite opencode, but dont touch anything, you can only use `cp`' kind of prompt
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#507It used the best tests it could find for existing compilers. This is effectively steering Claude to a well-defined solution. Hard to find fully specified problems like this in the wild. I think this is more a testament to small, well-written tests than it is agent teams. I imagine you could do the same thing with any frontier model and a single agent in a linear flow. I don’t know why people use parallel agents and i…
You know what else is well specified? LLM improving on itself.
I wouldn't describe intelligence as well specified.
We can't even agree on what it is.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
then you are misunderstaing the downvoting. it's not that the fact that they are burning money. it's the fact that this cost today 20k but that is not the real cost if you factor the it is losing money on this price. So Tomorrow when this "startup" will need to come out of their money burning phase, like every startup has to sooner or later, that cost will increase, because there is no other monetising avenue, at lea…
That would be insightful if the cost of inference weren’t declining at roughly 90% per year. Source: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
According to that article, the data they analyzed was API prices from LLM providers, not their actual cost to perform the inference. From that perspective, it's entirely possible to make "the cost of inference" appear to decline by simply subsidizing it more. The authors even hint at the same possibility in the overview:
> Note that while the data insight provides some commentary on what factors drive these price drops, we did not explicitly model these factors. Reduced profit margins may explain some of the drops in price, but we didn’t find clear evidence for this.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's amazing that it "works", but viability is another issue. It cost $20,000 and it worked, but it's also totally possible to spend $20,000 and have Claude shit out a pile of nonsense. You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not. Anthropic doesn't sell a contract that says "We'll only bill you if it works" like you can get from a bunch of humans. Do catastrophic bugs exist in…
> It cost $20,000 I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code??? You should look it up. :)
If my devs are writing that much code they're doing something wrong. Lines of code is an anti metric. That used to be commonly accepted knowledge.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#510I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/ This LLM did it in (checks notes): > Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs It may build, but does it boot (was also a significant and distinct next milestone)? (Also, will it blend?). Looks like yes! > The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootab…
This is getting close to a Ken Thompson "Trusting Trust" era -- AI could soon embed itself into the compilers themselves.
What I want to know is when we get AI decompilers
Intuitively it feels like it should be a straightforward training setup - there's lots of code out there, so compile it with various compilers, flags etc and then use those pairs of source+binary to train the model.