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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

#551

Post by psychoslave »

>The fix was to use GCC as an online known-good compiler oracle to compare against.

>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.

How does one re-conciliate both of this statements? Sure one can fetch all of gnu.org in local, and a model which already scrapped the whole internet somehow already integrated it in its weights, didn’t it?

The worldwide median household income (as of 2013 data from Gallup) was approximately $9,733 per year (in PPP, current international dollars). This means that $20,000 per year is more than double the global median income.

A median Luxembourg citizen earns $20,000 in about 5 to 6 months of work, a Burundi one would on median need 42.5 months, that is 3.5 years.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

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

#553

Post by organicUser »

byzantinegene wrote: post #512
qarl wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

well, if in this period it is a matter of cost, tomorrow won't be anymore. 4GB of RAM in the 80s would have cost tens of millions of dollars, now even your car runs 4 gb memory only for the infotainment systems, and runs dozens GBs of RAM for the most complex assistants. So i would see this achievement more as a warning, the final result is not what's concerning, it is the premonition behind it

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

#554

Post by viraptor »

icedchai wrote: post #394
qarl wrote: post #383

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.

It's a bit more nuanced. You can build a simple compiler without too many issues. But once you want it to do optimisations, flow control protection, good and fast register allocation, inling, autovectoriasation, etc. that's going to take a multiples of the original time.

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

#555

Post by rezonant »

qarl wrote: post #416
sarchertech wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, companies don’t pay people to write 100k LOC. They pay people to write useful software. We figured out that LOC was a useless productivity metric in the 80s.

[flagged]

I can't stress enough how much LOC is not a measure of anything.

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

#556

Post by icedchai »

fsflover wrote: post #501
icedchai wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46909529

I’ll be shocked if they are able to do it in 4 months, never mind 4 weeks.

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

#557

Post by rezonant »

icedchai wrote: post #394
qarl wrote: post #383

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.

> Building a working C compiler ... is an impossible task

I think you might be thinking of C++

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

#558

Post by psychoslave »

qarl wrote: post #369
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…

> 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. :)

Well, if these humans can cheat by taking whatever needed degree of liberty in copycat attitude to fit in the budget, I guess that a simple `git clone https://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git SomeLocalDir` is as close to $0 as one can hope to either reach. And it would end up being far more functional and reliable. But I get that big-corp overlords and their wanna-match-KPI minions will prefer an "clean-roomed" code base.

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

#559

Post by lelanthran »

qarl wrote: post #545
lelanthran wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. It is now. At any rate, this is my actual rate. I live in South Africa, and that's about 4 weeks of work for me, without an AI.

Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it. You must provide the entire git history with small commits. I won't be holding my breath.

> Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it.

> You must provide the entire git history with small commits.

> I won't be holding my breath.

Sure; I do this often (I operate as a company because I am a contractor) - money to be held in escrow, all the usual contracts, etc.

It's a big risk for you, though - the level of performance isn't stated in the linked article so a parser in Python is probably sufficient.

TCC, which has in the past compiled bootable Linux images, was only around 15k LoC in C!

For reference, for a engraved-in-stone spec, producing a command-line program (i.e. no tech stack other than a programming language with the standard library), a coder could reasonably produce +5000LoC per week.

Adding the necessary extensions to support booting isn't much either, because the 16-bit stuff can be done just the same as CC did it - shell out to GCC (thereby not needing many of the extensions).

Are you *really* sure that a simple C compiler will cost more than 4 weeks f/time to do? It takes 4 weeks or so in C, are you really sure it will take longer if I switch to (for example) Python?

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

#560

Post by icedchai »

rezonant wrote: post #557
icedchai wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Building a working C compiler ... is an impossible task I think you might be thinking of C++

I’m not. I’ve been working with C on and off for 30 years. Linux requires GNU extensions beyond standard C. Once you get the basics done, there’s still a lot more work to do. Compiling a trivial program might work. But you’ll hit an edge case or 50 in the millions of lines in Linux.

I also should’ve qualified my message with “in 2 weeks”, or even “in 2 months.” Given more time it’s obviously possible for more people.

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