> They claim the AI itself built an OS and demoed Doom running on it.

Doom ran on MS-DOS, which - by modern standards - provided a shockingly minimal set of abstractions for programs. I think about the only thing you need to run Doom is the int 21h "API" to access the FAT filesystem and perform keyboard I/O. Note that MS-DOS did not provide facilities such as memory virtualization / management, process management, video drivers, sound drivers, etc - that was all provided by the hardware itself, which had its own hardware interrupts handled by the code in the device's ROM. It's why Doom required you to choose the type of a sound card you have, the interrupt / DMA channel to use, etc.

So I think this is a lot less of a flex than it seems; in fact, Anthropic using agents to build a semi-unusable compiler is far more of an achievement. Providing enough of int 21h to run Doom is probably something that a human could do in a weekend, doubly so if they can peek at the source code of FreeDOS.

You have a real knack for explaining things. That makes total sense. Regarding the compiler part, I'm actually trying to build my own language using LLMs, and to be honest, it barely works. I wasn't very familiar with classic OS architectures like MS-DOS, but your breakdown really helped me understand the context

Wake me when the AI rewrites Doom completely from a single prompt.