61–70 of 377 posts
It would be interesting to compare the source code used by CCC to other projects. I have a slight suspicion that CCC stole a lot of code from other projects.
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
> Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless.
Pro-LLM: Read the freaking article, it's not that long. The compiler made a mistake in an area where only two compilers exist that are up to the task: Linux Kernel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. It's missing a tiny detail though. One side is demanding we keep giving hundreds of billions to them and at the same time promising the other side's unemployment.
And no-one ever stops and thinks about what it means to give up so much control. Maybe one of those companies will come out on top. The others produce garbage in comparison. Capital loves a single throat to choke and doesn't gently pluralise. So of course you buy the best service. And it really can generate any code, get it working, bug free. People unlearn coding on this level. And some day, poof, Microsoft is comin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This to me sounds a lot like the SpaceX conversation: - Ohh look it can [write small function / do a small rocket hop] but it can't [ write a compiler / get to orbit]! - Ohh look it can [write a toy compiler / get to orbit] but it can't [compile linux / be reusable] - Ohh look it can [compile linux / get reusable orbital rocket] but it can't [build a compiler that rivals GCC / turn the rockets around fast enough] - T…
> the insane rate of progress Yeah but the speed of progress can never catch the speed of a moving goalpost!
How do you like those coast-to-coast self drives since the end of 2017?
I am pretty sure everybody agrees that this result is somewhere between slop code that barely works and the pinnacle of AI-assisted compiler technology. But discussions should not be held from the extreme points. Instead, I am looking for a realistic estimation from the HN community about where to place these results in a human context. Since I have no experience with compilers, I would welcome any of your opinions.
"Ironically, among the four stages, the compiler (translation to assembly) is the most approachable one for an AI to build. It is mostly about pattern matching and rule application: take C constructs and map them to assembly patterns. The assembler is harder than it looks. It needs to know the exact binary encoding of every instruction for the target architecture. x86-64 alone has thousands of instruction variants wi…
I thought it was just the compiler that Anthropic produced.
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
This to me sounds a lot like the SpaceX conversation: - Ohh look it can [write small function / do a small rocket hop] but it can't [ write a compiler / get to orbit]! - Ohh look it can [write a toy compiler / get to orbit] but it can't [compile linux / be reusable] - Ohh look it can [compile linux / get reusable orbital rocket] but it can't [build a compiler that rivals GCC / turn the rockets around fast enough] - T…
Interesting that people call this "progress" :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two thoughts here: First, remember when we had LLMs run optimisation passes last year? Alphaevolve doing square packing, and optimising ML kernels? The "anti" crowd was like "well, of course it can automatically optimise some code, that's easy". And things like "wake me up when it does hard tasks". Now, suddenly when they do hard tasks, we're back at "haha, but it's unoptimised and slow, laaame". Second, if you could…
First off Alpha Evolve isn't an LLM. No more than a human is a kidney. Second depends. If you told them to pretrain for writing C compiler however long it takes, I could see a smaller team doing it in a week or two. Keep in mind LLMs pretrain on all OSS including GCC. > Meanwhile, at every step of the way these things become better and better. Will they? Or do they just ingest more data and compute?[1] Again, time wi…
It's a system based on LLMs.
> AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent powered by large language models for general-purpose algorithm discovery and optimization. AlphaEvolve pairs the creative problem-solving capabilities of our Gemini models with automated evaluators that verify answers, and uses an evolutionary framework to improve upon the most promising ideas.
> AlphaEvolve leverages an ensemble of state-of-the-art large language models: our fastest and most efficient model, Gemini Flash, maximizes the breadth of ideas explored, while our most powerful model, Gemini Pro, provides critical depth with insightful suggestions. Together, these models propose computer programs that implement algorithmic solutions as code.
I think this is a great example of both points of view in the ongoing debate. Pro-LLM coding agents: look! a working compiler built in a few hours by an agent! this is amazing! Anti-LLM coding agents: it's not a working compiler, though. And it doesn't matter how few hours it took, because it doesn't work. It's useless. Pro: Sure, but we can get the agent to fix that. Anti: Can you, though? We've seen that the more c…
Exactly. This flawed argument by which everything will be fixed by future models drives me crazy every time.