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Comment by gignico | Hacker News Reader

> To stress test it, I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust-based C compiler, from scratch, capable of compiling the Linux kernel. Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs, the agent team produced a 100,000-line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.

If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the compiler and of the compiled code, please, give me your $20,000, I'll give you your C compiler written from scratch :)

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> If you don't care about code quality, maintainability, readability, conformance to the specification, and performance of the compiler and of the compiled code, please, give me your $20,000, I'll give you your C compiler written from scratch :)

i don't know if you could. Let's say you get a check for $20k, how long will it take you to make an equivalent performing and compliant compiler? Are you going to put your life on pause until it's done for $20k? Who's going to pay your bills when the $20k is gone after 3 months?

There are plenty of people on HN who could re-implement a C compiler like this in less than three months. Algorithmically compilers like this are a solved problem that has been very well documented over the last sixty or seventy years. Implementing a small compiler is a typical MSc project that you might carry out in a couple of months alongside a taught masters.

This compiler is both slower than gcc even when optimising (you can’t actually turn optimisation off) & doesn’t reject type incorrect code so will happily accept illegal C code. It’s also apparently very brittle - what happens if you feed it the Linux kernel sources v. 6.10 instead of 6.9? - presumably it fails.

All of the above make it simultaneously 1) really, really impressive and 2) completely useless in the real world. Great for creating discussion though!

> Who's going to pay your bills when the $20k is gone after 3 months?

And who's going to maintain this turd the LLM pushed out? It's a cool one-shot sort of thing, but let's not pretend this is useful as a real compiler or something anyone would like to maintain, as a human.

One could keep improving one the implementation by vibing more, but I think that's just taking you to the wrong direction of the rabbit hole.

There is an entire Evaluation section that addresses that criticism (both in agreement and disagreement).

If we're just writing off the billions in up front investment costs, they can just send all that my way while we're at it. No problem. Everybody happy.

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