I think the fact that AI can make a working compiler is crazy, especially compared to what most of us thought was possible in this space 4 years ago. Lately, t

I think the fact that AI can make a working compiler is crazy, especially compared to what most of us thought was possible in this space 4 years ago. Lately, there have been a few examples of AI tackling what have traditionally been thought of as "hard" problems -- writing browsers and writing compilers. To Christ Lattner's point, these problems are only hard if you're doing it from scratch or doing something novel. But they're not particularly hard if you're just rewriting a reference implementation. Writing a clean room implementation of a browser or a compiler is really hard. Writing a new compiler or browser referencing existing implementations, but doing something novel is also really hard. But writing a new version of gcc or webkit by rephrasing their code isn't hard, it's just tedious. I'm sure many humans with zero compiler or browser programing experience could do it, but most people don't bother because what's the point? Now we have LLMs that can act as reference implementation launderers, and do it for the cost of tokens, so why not?