We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
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Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#2This is like a working version of the Cursor blog. The evidence - it compiling the Linux kernel - is much more impressive than a browser that didn't even compile (until manually intervened)
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#3> To stress test it, I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.
If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the compiler and of the compiled code, please, give me your $20,000, I'll give you your C compiler written from scratch :)
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#4> The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.
Worse than "-O0" takes skill...
So then, it produced something much worse than tcc (which is better than gcc -O0), an equivalent of which one man can produce in under two weeks. So even all those tokens and dollars did not equal one man's week of work.
Except the one man might explain such arbitrary and shitty code as this:
https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/blob/main/s...
why x9? who knows?!
Oh god the more i look at this code the happier I get. I can already feel the contracts coming to fix LLM slop like this when any company who takes this seriously needs it maintained and cannot...
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#5[deleted]
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#6> To stress test it, I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the c…
There is an entire Evaluation section that addresses that criticism (both in agreement and disagreement).
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#7This is like a working version of the Cursor blog. The evidence - it compiling the Linux kernel - is much more impressive than a browser that didn't even compile (until manually intervened)
It certainly slightly spoils what I was planning to be a fun little April Fool's joke (a daft but complete programming language). Last year's AI wasn't good enough to get me past the compiler-compiler even for the most fundamental basics, now it's all this.
I'll still work on it, of course. It just won't be so surprising.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#8Nothing in the post about whether the compiled kernel boots.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#9How about we get the LLM's to collaborate and design a perfect programming language for LLM coding, it would be terse (less tokens) easy for pattern searches etc and very fast to build, iterate over.
Re: We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler
#10> To stress test it, I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V. If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the c…
If we're just writing off the billions in up front investment costs, they can just send all that my way while we're at it. No problem. Everybody happy.