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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

#621

Post by [deleted] »

Philpax wrote: post #612
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I think you are exaggerating. My university had a course that required students to build a C compiler that could run the C subset of SPECint (which includes frigging Perl) and this was the usual 3 month class that was not expected to fill in 24h of your time, so I'd say 1 week sounds perfectly reasonable for someone already familiar. Good enough C for a shitton of projects is barely more complicated than wri…

I really, really don't think so, but you're welcome to try :-)

[deleted]

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

#622

Post by Chaosvex »

sarchertech wrote: post #375
qarl wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. :)

You wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues. If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.

> you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k

I fork Clang or GCC and rename it. I'll take only $10k.

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

#623

Post by bee_rider »

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.

You seem to have doubled down on a bluff that was already called.

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

#624

Post by artisin »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #186
kgeist wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the internet is duplicate data, low quality content, SEO spam etc. I wouldn't be surprised if 1 TB is a significant portion of the high-quality, information-dense part of the internet.

I would be extremely surprised if it was that small.

I was curious about the scale of 1TiB of text. According to WolframAlpha, it's roughly 1.1 trillion characters, which breaks down to 180.2 billion words, 360.5 million pages, or 16.2 billion lines. In terms of professional typing speed, that's about 3800 years of continuous work.

So post-deduplication, I think it's a fair assessment that a significant portion of high-quality text could fit within 1TiB. Tho 'high-quality' is a pretty squishy and subjective term.

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

#625

Post by franktankbank »

visarga wrote: post #456
Calavar wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The classical definition of a clean room implementation is something that's made by looking at the output of a prior implementation but not at the source. I agree that having a reference compiler available is a huge caveat though. Even if we completely put training data leakage aside, they're developing against a programmatic checker for a spec that's already had millions of man hours put into it. This is an optimal…

This is the reimplementation scenario for agentic coding. If you have a good spec and battery of tests you can delete the code and reimplement it. Code is no longer the product of eng work, it is more like bytecode now, you regenerate it, you don't read it. If you have to read it then you are just walking a motorcycle. We have seen at least 3 of these projects - the JustHTML one, the FastRender and this one. All star…

Great way to get constantly moving holes.

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

#626

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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 spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel

Did this come down to making Clang 100% gcc compatible (extensions, UDB, bugs and all), or were there any issues that might be considered as specific to the linux kernel?

Did you end up building a gcc compatability test suite as a part of this? Did the gcc project themselves have a regression/test suite that you were able to use as a starting point?

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

#627

Post by polyglotfacto »

So I do think one can get value from coding agents, but that value is out of proportion compared to the investments made by the AI labs, so now they're pushing this kind of stuff which I find to be a borderline scam.

Let me explain why:

> the resulting compiled output is over 60kb, far exceeding the 32k code limit enforced by Linux

Seems like a failure to me.

> I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality.

This has code smell written all over it.

----

Conclusion: this cost 20k to build, not taking into account the money spent on training the model. How much would you pay for this software? Zero.

The reality is that LLM are up there with SQL and ROR(or above) in terms of changing how people write software and interact with data. That's a big deal, but not enough to support trillion dollar valuations.

So you get things like this project, which are just about driving a certain narrative.

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

#628

Post by smithcoin »

boring-human wrote: post #453

People focused on the flaws are missing the picture. Opus wasn't even trained to be "a member of a team of engineers," it was adapted to the task by one person with a shell script loop. Specific training for this mode of operation is inevitable. And model "IQ" is increasing with every generation. If human IQ is increasing at all, it's only because the engineer pool is shrinking more at one end than the other. This is…

> This is a five-alarm fire if you're a SWE and not retiring in the next couple years.

I’m sorry, but this is such a hype beast take. In my opinion this is equivalent to telling people not to learn to drive five years ago because of self driving from Tesla. How is that going?

Every single line of code produced is a liability. This idea that you’re going to have “gas town” like agents running and building apps without humans in the loop at any point to generate liability free revenue is insane to me.

Are humans infallible? Obviously not. But if you are telling me that ‘magic probability machines’ are creating safe, secure, and compliant software that has no need for engineers to participate in the output- first I’d like to see a citation and second I have a bridge to sell you.

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

#629

Post by emp17344 »

the8472 wrote: post #295
regularfry wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is firmly where I am. "The wonder is not how well the dog dances, it is that it dances at all."

"It's like if a squirrel started playing chess and instead of "holy shit this squirrel can play chess!" most people responded with "But his elo rating sucks""

But people have been telling us for years that the squirrel was going to improve at chess at an exponential rate and take over the world through sheer chess-mastery.

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

#630

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

brundolf wrote: post #615
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…

One thing people have pointed out is that well-specified (even if huge and tedious) projects are an ideal fit for AI, because the loop can be fully closed and it can test and verify the artifact by itself with certainty. Someone was saying they had it generate a rudimentary JS engine because the available test suite is so comprehensive Not to invalidate this! But it's toward the "well-suited for AI" end of the spectr…

Yes - the gcc "torture test suite" that is mentioned must have been one of the enablers for this.

It's notable that the article says Claude was unable to build a working assembler (& linker), which is nominally a much simpler task than building a compiler. I wonder if this was at least in part due to not having a test suite, although it seems one could be auto generated during bootstrapping with gas (GNU assembler) by creating gas-generated (asm, ELF) pairs as the necessary test suite.

It does beg the question of how they got the compiler to point of correctness of generating a valid C -> asm mapping, before tackling the issue of gcc compatibility, since the generated code apparently has no relation to what gcc generates. I wonder which compilers' source code Claude has been trained on, and how closely this compiler's code generation and attempted optimizations compares to those?

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