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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

#511

Post by shubhamjain »

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…

Yeah, I am amazed how people are brushing this off simply because GCC exists. This was far more challenging task than the browser thing, because of how far few open source compilers are there. Add to that no internet access and no dependencies.

At this point, it’s hard to deny that AI has become capable of completing extremely difficult tasks, provided it has enough time and tokens.

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

#512

Post by byzantinegene »

qarl wrote: post #332
ndesaulniers wrote: post #165

I 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…

> Still a really cool project! Yeah. This test sorta definitely proves that AI is legit. Despite the millions of people still insisting it's a hoax. The fact that the optimizations aren't as good as the 40 year gcc project? Eh - I think people who focus on that are probably still in some serious denial.

it costs $20,000 to reinvent the wheel, that it probably trained on. If that's your definition of legit, sure

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

#513

Post by bjackman »

shubhamjain wrote: post #511
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…

Yeah, I am amazed how people are brushing this off simply because GCC exists. This was far more challenging task than the browser thing, because of how far few open source compilers are there. Add to that no internet access and no dependencies. At this point, it’s hard to deny that AI has become capable of completing extremely difficult tasks, provided it has enough time and tokens.

I don't think this is more challenging than the browser thing. The scope is much smaller. The fact that this is "only" 100k lines is evidence for this. But, it's still very impressive.

I think this is Anthropic seeing the Cursor guy's bullshit and saying "but, we need to show people that the AI _can actually_ do very impressive shit as long as you pick a more sensible goal"

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

#514

Post by byzantinegene »

tumdum_ wrote: post #346
PostOnce wrote: post #336

Earlier 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…

> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it. It seems they are *not* losing money on inference: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e

no, and that is widely known. the actual problem is that the margins are not sufficient at that scale to make up for the gargantuan training costs to train their SOTA model.

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

#515

Post by wiseowise »

iberator wrote: post #470
ndesaulniers wrote: post #165

I 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…

Claude did not wrote it. you wrote it with PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE with 20.000 long commandshyellihg him exactly what to do. Real usable AI would create it with simple: 'make c compilers c99 faster than GCC'. AI usage should be banned in general. It takes jobs faster than creating new ones ..

> It takes jobs faster than creating new ones ..

You think compiler engineer from Google gives a single shit about this?

They’ll automate millions out of career existence for their amusement while cashing out stock money and retiring early comfortably.

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

#517

Post by byzantinegene »

ip26 wrote: post #492
ndesaulniers wrote: post #165

I 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…

I’m excited and waiting for the team that shows with $20k in credits they can substantially speed up the generated code by improving clang!

i'm sorry but that will take another $20 billion in AI capex to train our latest SOTA model so that it will cost $20k to improve the code.

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

#518

Post by tymonPartyLate »

I try to see this like F1 racing. Building a browser or a C compiler with agent swarms is disconnected from the reality of normal software projects. In normal projects the requirements are not full understood upfront and you learn and adapt and change as you make progress. But the innovations from professional racing result in better cars for everyone. We'll probably get better dev tools and better coding agents thanks to those experiments.

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

#519

Post by sublimefire »

andrewshawcare wrote: post #397

It 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…

> Isn’t one agent fast enough? Why lose accuracy over +- one week to write a compiler?

My thinking as well, IMO it is because you need to wait for results for longer. You basically want to shorten the loops to improve the system. It hints at a problem that most of what we see is a challenge to seed a good context for it to successfully do something in many iterations.

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

#520

Post by wiseowise »

missingdays wrote: post #157
yu3zhou4 wrote: post #113

At this point, I genuinely don't know what to learn next to not become obsolete when another Opus version gets released

Learn to fix bugs, it's gonna be more relevant than ever

That’s already Opus 4.7s main selling point.
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