4 ms·

> $20,000 set on fire To be fair, that's two weeks of the employer cost of a FAANG engineer's labor. And no human hacks a working compiler in two weeks. It's

by ajross 9mo ago

> $20,000 set on fire To be fair, that's two weeks of the employer cost of a FAANG engineer's labor. And no human hacks a working compiler in two weeks. It's a lot of AI compute for a demo, sure. But $20k stunts are hardly unique. Clearly there's value being demonstrated here.

pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
Is there really value being presented here? Is this codebase a stable enough base to continue developing this compiler or does it warrant a total rewrite? Honest question, it seems like the author mentioned it being at its limits. This mirrors my own experience with Opus in that it isn't that great at defining abstractions in one-shot at least. Maybe with enough loops it could converge but I haven't seen definite proof of that in current generation with these ambitious clickbaity projects.
- ajross 9mo ago
  If it generates a booting kernel and passes the test suite at 99% it's probably good enough to use, yeah. The point isn't to replace GCC per se, it's to demonstrate that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve whatever problem it is you do have.
  - pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
    > it's probably good enough to use, yea. Not for general purpose use, only for demo. > that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve But if this can't come close to replacing GCC and can't be modified without introducing bugs then it hasn't proven this yet. I learned some new hacks from the paper and that's great and all but from my experiencing of trying to harness even 4 claude sessions in parallel on a complex task it just goes off the rails in terms of coherence. I'll try the new techniques but my intuition is that its not really as good as you are selling it.
    - ajross 9mo ago
      > Not for general purpose use, only for demo. What does that mean, though? I mean, it's already meeting a very high quality bar by booting at all and passing those tests. No, it doesn't beat existing solutions on all the checkboxes, but that's not what the demo is about. The point being demonstrated is that if you need a "custom compiler" or something similar for your own new, greenfield requirement, you can have it at pretty-clearly-near-shippable quality in two weeks for $20k. And if people can't smell the disruption there, I don't know what to say.
      - vuciuc 9mo ago
        > you can have it at pretty-clearly-near-shippable quality in two weeks for $20k. if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails.
        ajross 9mo ago
        > if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails. Doesn't matter because your competitors will have beaten you to market. That's just a simple Darwinian point, no AI magic needed. No one doubts that things will be different in the coming Claudepocalypse, and new ideas about quality and process will need to happen to manage it. But sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that our stone tools are still better is just a path to early retirement at this point.
        pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
        I feel like maybe you spend too much time watching hypefluencers. AI tools are great but if they are already super intelligent why haven't you gotten a swarm of agents to build yourself a billion dollar SaaS? It's hard to separate the bullshit from reality when the hype is just turned to the max everywhere you turn. It feels like I'm in some elaborate psy-op where my experiences with these tools are just an order of magnitude lower than the hype and I can't even express those thoughts without having "luddite" patch attached to me. And if you read between the lines of what Karpathy wrote in his famous "anxiety" post, it kind of echoes my point. Its "an alien technology and we can't yield it right" yada yada. Which is an odd way to say "sometimes this thing works magically but a lot of the time its total shit so you aren't as productive as you would like".
- segh 9mo ago
  This is an experiment to see the current limit of AI capabilities. The end result isn't useful, but the fact is established that in Feb 2026, you can spend $20k on AI to get a inefficient but working C complier.
  - latexr 9mo ago
    > The end result isn't useful Then, as your parent comment asked, is there value in it? $20K, which is more than the yearly minimum wage in several countries in Europe, was spent recreating a worse version of something we already have, just to see if it was possible, using a system which increases inequality and makes climate change—which is causing people to die—worse.
  - ajross 9mo ago
    > inefficient but working FWIW, an inefficient but working product is pretty much the definition of a startup MVP. People are getting hung up on the fact that it doesn't beat gcc and clang, and generalizing to the idea that such a thing can't possibly be useful. But clearly it can, and is. This builds and boots Linux. A putative MVP might launch someone's dreams. For $20k! The reflexive ludditism is kinda scary actually. We're beyond the "will it work" phase and the disruption is happening in front of us. I was a luddite 10 months ago. I was wrong.
    - pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
      You are projecting and over-reacting. My response is measured against the insane hype this is getting beyond what was demonstrared. I never said ot wasn't impressive. I'm not hung up on anything. Clearly the project isn't stable because it can't be modified without regression. It can be an MVP but if it needs someone to rewrite it or spend many man-months just to grok the code to add to it then its conceivable it isnt an economic win in the long run. Also, they haven't compared this to what a smaller set of agents could accomplish with the same task and thus I am still not fully sold on the economic viability of horizontally scaling agents at this time (well at least not on the task that was tested).
    - polyglotfacto 8mo ago
lionkor 9mo ago
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 take your AST and translate it to an IR, and then feed that into anything that generates code. You could use crainlift or whatever it's called, you could roll your own.
- Anon1096 9mo ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905771
  - latexr 9mo ago
    If you spend a decade working on something, you’re not “hacking it”.
  - lionkor 9mo ago
    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).
- ajross 9mo ago
  > 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. Yes yes, we all know how to write a compiler because we took a class on it. That's like "Elite CS Nerd Basic Admission". We still can't actually do it at the cost being demonstrated, and you know it.
a456463 9mo ago
Humans can hack a compiler in much less. Stop reading this hype and focus on learning

by ajross 9mo ago

pcloadlett3r 9mo ago

Is there really value being presented here? Is this codebase a stable enough base to continue developing this compiler or does it warrant a total rewrite? Honest question, it seems like the author mentioned it being at its limits. This mirrors my own experience with Opus in that it isn't that great at defining abstractions in one-shot at least. Maybe with enough loops it could converge but I haven't seen definite proof of that in current generation with these ambitious clickbaity projects.

ajross 9mo ago
If it generates a booting kernel and passes the test suite at 99% it's probably good enough to use, yeah. The point isn't to replace GCC per se, it's to demonstrate that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve whatever problem it is you do have.
- pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
  > it's probably good enough to use, yea. Not for general purpose use, only for demo. > that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve But if this can't come close to replacing GCC and can't be modified without introducing bugs then it hasn't proven this yet. I learned some new hacks from the paper and that's great and all but from my experiencing of trying to harness even 4 claude sessions in parallel on a complex task it just goes off the rails in terms of coherence. I'll try the new techniques but my intuition is that its not really as good as you are selling it.
  - ajross 9mo ago
    > Not for general purpose use, only for demo. What does that mean, though? I mean, it's already meeting a very high quality bar by booting at all and passing those tests. No, it doesn't beat existing solutions on all the checkboxes, but that's not what the demo is about. The point being demonstrated is that if you need a "custom compiler" or something similar for your own new, greenfield requirement, you can have it at pretty-clearly-near-shippable quality in two weeks for $20k. And if people can't smell the disruption there, I don't know what to say.
    - vuciuc 9mo ago
      > you can have it at pretty-clearly-near-shippable quality in two weeks for $20k. if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails.
      - ajross 9mo ago
        > if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails. Doesn't matter because your competitors will have beaten you to market. That's just a simple Darwinian point, no AI magic needed. No one doubts that things will be different in the coming Claudepocalypse, and new ideas about quality and process will need to happen to manage it. But sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that our stone tools are still better is just a path to early retirement at this point.
        pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
        I feel like maybe you spend too much time watching hypefluencers. AI tools are great but if they are already super intelligent why haven't you gotten a swarm of agents to build yourself a billion dollar SaaS? It's hard to separate the bullshit from reality when the hype is just turned to the max everywhere you turn. It feels like I'm in some elaborate psy-op where my experiences with these tools are just an order of magnitude lower than the hype and I can't even express those thoughts without having "luddite" patch attached to me. And if you read between the lines of what Karpathy wrote in his famous "anxiety" post, it kind of echoes my point. Its "an alien technology and we can't yield it right" yada yada. Which is an odd way to say "sometimes this thing works magically but a lot of the time its total shit so you aren't as productive as you would like".
segh 9mo ago
This is an experiment to see the current limit of AI capabilities. The end result isn't useful, but the fact is established that in Feb 2026, you can spend $20k on AI to get a inefficient but working C complier.
- latexr 9mo ago
  > The end result isn't useful Then, as your parent comment asked, is there value in it? $20K, which is more than the yearly minimum wage in several countries in Europe, was spent recreating a worse version of something we already have, just to see if it was possible, using a system which increases inequality and makes climate change—which is causing people to die—worse.
- ajross 9mo ago
  > inefficient but working FWIW, an inefficient but working product is pretty much the definition of a startup MVP. People are getting hung up on the fact that it doesn't beat gcc and clang, and generalizing to the idea that such a thing can't possibly be useful. But clearly it can, and is. This builds and boots Linux. A putative MVP might launch someone's dreams. For $20k! The reflexive ludditism is kinda scary actually. We're beyond the "will it work" phase and the disruption is happening in front of us. I was a luddite 10 months ago. I was wrong.
  - pcloadlett3r 9mo ago
    You are projecting and over-reacting. My response is measured against the insane hype this is getting beyond what was demonstrared. I never said ot wasn't impressive. I'm not hung up on anything. Clearly the project isn't stable because it can't be modified without regression. It can be an MVP but if it needs someone to rewrite it or spend many man-months just to grok the code to add to it then its conceivable it isnt an economic win in the long run. Also, they haven't compared this to what a smaller set of agents could accomplish with the same task and thus I am still not fully sold on the economic viability of horizontally scaling agents at this time (well at least not on the task that was tested).
  - polyglotfacto 8mo ago

lionkor 9mo ago

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 take your AST and translate it to an IR, and then feed that into anything that generates code. You could use crainlift or whatever it's called, you could roll your own.

Anon1096 9mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905771
- latexr 9mo ago
  If you spend a decade working on something, you’re not “hacking it”.
- lionkor 9mo ago
  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).
ajross 9mo ago
> 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. Yes yes, we all know how to write a compiler because we took a class on it. That's like "Elite CS Nerd Basic Admission". We still can't actually do it at the cost being demonstrated, and you know it.

a456463 9mo ago

Humans can hack a compiler in much less. Stop reading this hype and focus on learning