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pronHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

> where are we seeing that it failed? Anthropic said the experiment failed to produce a workable C …

> where are we seeing that it failed? Anthropic said the experiment failed to produce a workable C compiler: - I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality. - The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler. (source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler ) Software that cannot be evolved is dead software. That in some PR communications they misrepresented their own engineer's report is beside the point. > It compiled multiple projects successfully albeit less optimized. 150,000x slower ( https://github.com/harshavmb/compare-claude-compiler ) is not "less optimised". It's unworkable. > Like I think people don't realize not even 7 months ago it wasn't writing this at all. …

Original discussionI don't think AI will make your processes go faster454 source comments · at import
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IA
ianbutlerHN

Sorry where are we seeing that it failed? It compiled multiple projects successfully albeit less optimized. " It lacks the 16-bit x86 compiler that is necessary to boot Linux out of real mode. For this, it calls out to GCC (the x86_32 and x86_64 compilers are its own). It does not have its own assembler and linker; these are the very last bits that Claude started automating and are still somewhat buggy. The demo video was produced with a GCC assembler and linker. The compiler successfully builds many projects, but not all. It's not yet a drop-in replacement for a real compiler. The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled. The Rust code quality is reasonable, but is nowhere near the quality of what an expert Rust programmer might produce. " For faffing about with a multi agent system…

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ianbutlerHN

> Can they write production software without careful and close human supervision? Not yet. That's not disparagement, just an observation of where we are today. I never claimed they could! I just view this as a successful experiment. I don't think anthropic was making that claim with their experiment either. It feels reflexive to the moment to argue against that claim, but I tend to operate with a bit more nuance than "all good" or "all bad".

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tardedmemeHN

This evaluation appears to be AI-written itself. It claims a 3x slowdown and a 4x slowdown combine to produce a 158000x slowdown "because there are billions of iterations" - yeah well both versions of the program had the same number of iterations. Does anyone know how the 158000x slowdown happened? That's quite ridiculous.

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