I'm more impressed by this than AI-generated images; a few tiny imperfections in the latter are not a big deal, and even humans often make mistakes with little effect, but code has a far higher bar of correctness to meet. The fact that AI can even generate working real-mode 16-bit code reasonably well and not turn into Electron-levels of inefficiency was most surprising.

Exactly this! Recently I saw a project that is heavily AI assisted to port Doom to the Neo Geo. That is hardware that works in a totally opposite fashion to how Doom runs. It is a 12Mhz 68K chip with no frame buffer. And yet, they are making it work and with surprising performance.

Considering how little open Neo Geo code is probably out there to train on, that these models can build to this is very impressive.