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 that seems like a pretty successful experiment to me.

Source: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

Edit: Like I think people don't realize not even 7 months ago it wasn't writing this at all.

> 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.

There's no doubt that producing a C compiler that isn't workable and is effectively bricked as it cannot be evolved but still compiles some programs is great progress, but it's still a long way off of auonomously building production software. Can today's LLM do amazing things and offer tremendous help in software development? Absolutely. 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.

Yeah I think people are really underestimating what LLMs can do even without specs.

As an example, I did an exploratory attempt to add custom software over some genuinely awful windows software for a scientific imaging station with a proprietary industrial camera. Five days later Claude and I had figured out how to USB-pcap sample images and it's operationalized and smoothly running for months now. 100% of the code written by Claude, it's all clean (reviewed it myself) pretty much all I did was unstuck it at a few places, "hey based on the file sizes it looks like the images are being sent as a 16-bit format")

For day to day work, I'll often identify a bug, "hey, when I shift click on this graphical component, it's not doing the right thing". I go tell Claude to write a RED (failing) integration test, then make it pass.

Zero lines of code manually written. Only occasionally do I have to intervene and rearchitect. Usually thus involves me writing about ten lines of scaffold code, explaining the architectural concept, and telling it to just go