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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

#711

Post by [deleted] »

famouswaffles wrote: post #702
nozzlegear wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kind of a meaningless statement yeah? If you say so. It's clear you think these marketing announcements are still "exponential improvements" for some reason, but hey, I'm not an AI hype beast so by all means keep exponentialing lol

I'm not asking you to change your belief. By all means, think we're just around the corner of a plateau, but like I said, your statement is nothing meaningful or profound. It's your guess that things are about to slow down, that's all. It's better to just say that rather than talking about S curves and bends like you have any more insight than OP.

[deleted]

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

#712

Post by nozzlegear »

esafak wrote: post #449
nozzlegear wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every S-curve looks like an exponential until you hit the bend.

What if it plateaus smarter than us? You wouldn't be able to discern where it stopped. I'm not convinced it won't be able to create its own training data to keep improving. I see no ceiling on the horizon, other than energy.

Are we talking Terminator or Matrix here? I need to know which shitty future to prepare for.

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

#713

Post by abc123abc123 »

qarl wrote: post #650
lelanthran wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Too late friend, you've revealed your stripes. So you are not willing to put $20k in escrow for, as per your offer: >>>> Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it. I just noticed now that you actually offered double. I will do it. This is my real name, my contact details are not hard to find. I will do it, with emitted binaries performing as well as or better than the…

HA.

lelanthran won, qarl lost. Well played lelanthran!

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

#714

Post by signatoremo »

sarchertech wrote: post #586
pertymcpert wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude was not reverse engineering here. By your definition no one can do a clean room implementation if they've taken a recent compilers course at university.

Claude was reverse engineering gcc. It was using it as an oracle and attempting to exactly march its output. That is the definition of reverse engineering. Since Claude was trained on the gcc source code, that’s not a clean room implementation. > By your definition no one can do a clean room implementation if they've taken a recent compilers course at university. Clean room implementation has a very specific definiti…

There is no specific definition of clean room implementation. Please provide source for your claim otherwise.

There are many well known examples of clean room implementation. One example that survived lawsuits is Sony v. Connectix:

During production, Connectix unsuccessfully attempted a Chinese wall approach to reverse engineer the BIOS, so its engineers disassembled the object code directly. Connectix's successful appeal maintained that the direct disassembly and observation of proprietary code was necessary because there was no other way to determine its behavior - [0]

That practice is similar to GCC being used here to verify the output of the generated compiler, arguably even more intrusive.

[0] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

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

#715

Post by lionkor »

ajross wrote: post #606
lionkor wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes a human can hack together a compiler in two weeks. If you can't, you should turn off the AI and learn for yourself for a while. Writing a compiler is not a flex; it's a couple very well understood problems, most of which can be solved using existing libraries. Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of). Then…

> Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of). No human being writes a recursive descent parser for "Linux Kernel C" in two weeks, though. And AFAIK there's no downloadable BNF for that you can hand to an automatic generator either, you have to write it and test it and refine it. And you can't do it in two weeks.…

I wrote a couple hobby compilers. The only difficulty with C is the ambiguous syntax.

Now compare the article's setup with a single senior engineer who uses an agent or two at the same time.

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

#716

Post by lionkor »

Anon1096 wrote: post #539
lionkor wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes a human can hack together a compiler in two weeks. If you can't, you should turn off the AI and learn for yourself for a while. Writing a compiler is not a flex; it's a couple very well understood problems, most of which can be solved using existing libraries. Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of). Then…

Meanwhile: > I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905771

Afaik the Linux Kernel strongly depends on GCC extensions and GCC specific behavior, so maybe that's why this is such an interesting part? Also extensions like inline assembly seem wildly complicated to add to an existing compiler WHILE replicating the syntax and semantics of another compiler (which has a different software architecture).

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

#717

Post by esafak »

nozzlegear wrote: post #712
esafak wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it plateaus smarter than us? You wouldn't be able to discern where it stopped. I'm not convinced it won't be able to create its own training data to keep improving. I see no ceiling on the horizon, other than energy.

Are we talking Terminator or Matrix here? I need to know which shitty future to prepare for.

Using humans as batteries makes no sense. I expect robots will know better than that.

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

#718

Post by ndesaulniers »

jcranmer wrote: post #354
ndesaulniers wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's parts of LLVM architecture that are long in the tooth (IMO) (as is the language it's implemented in, IMO). I had hoped one day to re-implement parts of LLVM itself in Rust; in particular, I've been curious if we can concurrently compile C (and parse C in parallel, or lazily) that haven't been explored in LLVM, and I think might be safer to do in Rust. I don't know enough about grammers to know if it's technic…

> I had hoped one day to re-implement parts of LLVM itself in Rust Heh, earlier this day, I was just thinking how crazy a proposal would it actually be to have a Rust dependency (specifically, the egg crate, since one of the things I'm banging my head against right now might be better solved with egraphs).

Guess I better add https://github.com/bytecodealliance/rfcs/blob/main/accepted/... to my reading list!

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

#720

Post by m00x »

qarl wrote: post #660
m00x wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the human and the code it outputs. I can get my 2y old child to output 100k LoC, but it won't be very good.

Your 2yr old can't build a C compiler in Rust that builds Linux. Sorry mate, I think you're tripping.

I never said this. I think you're the one tripping mate.
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