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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

#61

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".

What Rust-based compiler is it plagiarising from?

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

#62
post #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.

For employment I mean "WHATEVER LEADS TO REWARD COLLECTIVE HUMANS TO SURVIVE".

Call it as you wish, but I am certainly not talking about coding values.

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

#63
post #44

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.

No one needs to prove you wrong. That’s just personal insecurity trying to justify ones own worth.

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

#64
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…

LLMs can regurgitate almost all of the Harry Potter books, among others [0]. Clearly, these models can actually regurgitate large amounts of their training data, and reconstructing any gaps would be a lot less impressive than implementing the project truly from scratch.

(I'm not claiming this is what actually happened here, just pointing out that memorization is a lot more plausible/significant than you say)

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/09/boffins_probe_commerc...

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

#65
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Prove this statement wrong. If all it takes is "trained on the Internet" and "decompress stored knowledge", then surely gpt3, 3.5, 4, 4.1, 4o, o1, o3, o4, 5, 5.1, 5.x should have been able to do it, right? Claude 2, 3, 4, 4.1, 4.5? Surely.

Perhaps 4.5 could also do it? We don’t know really until we try. I don’t trust the marketing material as much. The fact that the previous version (smaller versions) couldn’t or could do it does not really disprove that claim.

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

#66
> This was a clean-room implementation (Claude did not have internet access at any point during its development);

This is absolutely false and I wish the people doing these demonstrations were more honest.

It had access to GCC! Not only that, using GCC as an oracle was critical and had to be built in by hand.

Like the web browser project this shows how far you can get when you have a reference implementation, good benchmarks, and clear metrics. But that's not the real world for 99% of people, this is the easiest scenario for any ML setting.

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

#67
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the best of my knowledge, there's no Rust-based compiler that comes anywhere close to 99% on the GCC torture test suite, or able to compile Doom. So even if it saw the internals of GCC and a lot of other compilers, the ability to recreate this step-by-step in Rust is extremely impressive to me.

The impressiveness of converting C to Rust by any means is kind of contingent on how much unnecessary unsafe there is in the end result though.

None - all references to 'unsafe' are in comments about the codegen: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aanthropics%2Fclaudes-c-co...

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

#68
post #45

100.000 lines of code for something that is literally a text book task? I guess if it only created 1.000 lines it would be easy to see where those lines came from.

A simple C89 compiler is a textbook task; a GCC-compatible compiler targeting multiple architectures that can pass 99% of the GCC torture test suite is absolutely not.

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

#69
I would like to see the following published:

- All prompts used

- The structure of the agent team (which agents / which roles)

- Any other material that went into the process

This would be a good source for learning, even though I'm not ready to spend 20k$ just for replicating the experiment.

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

#70
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A symptom of the increasing backlash against generative AI (both in creative industries and in coding) is that any flaw in the resulting product is predicate to call it AI slop, even if it's very explicitly upfront that it's an experimental demo/proof of concept and not the NEXT BIG THING being hyped by influencers. That nuance is dead even outside of social media.

AI companies set that expectation when their CEOs ran around telling anyone who would listen that their product is a generational paradigm shift that will completely restructure both labor markets and human cognition itself. There is no nuance in their own PR, so why should they benefit from any when their product can't meet those expectations?

Because it leads to poor and nonconstructive discourse that doesn't educate anyone about the implications of the tech, which is expected on social media but has annoyingly leaked to Hacker News.

There's been more than enough drive-by comments from new accounts/green names even in this HN submission alone.

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