Comment by lubujackson
21 days ago
This is very much a "vibe coding can build you the Great Pyramids but it can't build a cathedral" situation, as described earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898223
I know this is an impressive accomplishment and is meant to show us the future potential, but it achieves big results by throwing an insane amount of compute at the problem, brute forcing its way to functionality. $20,000 set on fire, at Claude's discounted Max pricing no less.
Linear results from exponential compute is not nothing, but this certain feels like a dead end approach. The frontier should be more complexity for less compute, not more complexity from an insane amount more compute.
> $20,000 set on fire
To be fair, that's two weeks of the employer cost of a FAANG engineer's labor. And no human hacks a working compiler in two weeks.
It's a lot of AI compute for a demo, sure. But $20k stunts are hardly unique. Clearly there's value being demonstrated here.
Yes a human can hack together a compiler in two weeks.
If you can't, you should turn off the AI and learn for yourself for a while.
Writing a compiler is not a flex; it's a couple very well understood problems, most of which can be solved using existing libraries.
Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of).
Then take your AST and translate it to an IR, and then feed that into anything that generates code. You could use crainlift or whatever it's called, you could roll your own.
Meanwhile:
> I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905771
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> Parsing is solved with yacc, bison, or sitting down and writing a recursive descent parser (works for most well designed languages you can think of).
No human being writes a recursive descent parser for "Linux Kernel C" in two weeks, though. And AFAIK there's no downloadable BNF for that you can hand to an automatic generator either, you have to write it and test it and refine it. And you can't do it in two weeks.
Yes yes, we all know how to write a compiler because we took a class on it. That's like "Elite CS Nerd Basic Admission". We still can't actually do it at the cost being demonstrated, and you know it.
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Is there really value being presented here? Is this codebase a stable enough base to continue developing this compiler or does it warrant a total rewrite? Honest question, it seems like the author mentioned it being at its limits. This mirrors my own experience with Opus in that it isn't that great at defining abstractions in one-shot at least. Maybe with enough loops it could converge but I haven't seen definite proof of that in current generation with these ambitious clickbaity projects.
This is an experiment to see the current limit of AI capabilities. The end result isn't useful, but the fact is established that in Feb 2026, you can spend $20k on AI to get a inefficient but working C complier.
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If it generates a booting kernel and passes the test suite at 99% it's probably good enough to use, yeah.
The point isn't to replace GCC per se, it's to demonstrate that reasonably working software of equivalent complexity is within reach for $20k to solve whatever problem it is you do have.
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Humans can hack a compiler in much less. Stop reading this hype and focus on learning
> $20,000 in API costs
I would interpret this as being at API pricing. At subscription pricing, it's probably at most 5 or 6 Max subscriptions worth.