Comment by qarl
21 days ago
> It cost $20,000
I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
You should look it up. :)
21 days ago
> It cost $20,000
I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
You should look it up. :)
> > It cost $20,000
> I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
I'll bite - I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k, and it won't be 100k lines of code (maybe 15k, the last time I did this?).
It won't take me a week, though.
I think this project is a good frame of reference and matches my experience - vibing with AI is sometimes more expensive than doing it myself, and always results in much more code than necessary.
Does it support x64, x8664, arm64 and riscv? (sorry, just trolling - we don't know the quality of backend other than x8664 which is supposed to be able to build bootable linux.)
It's not hard to build a compiler just for a bootable linux.
I see no test criteria that actually runs that built linux through various test plans, so, yeah emitting enough asm just to boot is doable.
> I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k
You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. Even 10 times that would be seriously lowballing in the realm of contract work, regardless of whether it’s “optimised” or not (most software isn’t).
> You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly.
It is now.
At any rate, this is my actual rate. I live in South Africa, and that's about 4 weeks of work for me, without an AI.
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No, you're overestimating how complex it is to write an unoptimized C compiler. C is (in the grand scheme of things) a very simple language to implement a compiler for.
The rate probably goes up if you ask for more and more standards (C11, C17, C23...) but it's still a lot easier than compilers for almost any other popular language.
This is very much a John Brown claim that will in the end, kill the OP. I'd rather have the OP using LLM powered code review tools to add their experience to that AI generated compiler.
That feels like Silicon-Valley-centric point of view. Plus who would really spend $20k in building any C compiler today in the actual landscape of software?
All that this is saying is that license laundering of a code-base is now $20k away through automated processes, at least if the original code base is fully available. Well, with current state-of-the-art you’ll actually end up with a code-base which is not as good as the original, but that’s it.
That's irrelevant in this context, because it's not "get the humans to make a working product OR get the AI to make a working product"
The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans.
Coincidentally yes, I am aware, my last contract was building out a SCADA module the AI failed to develop at the company that contracted me.
I'm using that money to finance a new software company, and so far, AI hasn't been much help getting us off the ground.
Edit: oh yeah, and on top of paying Claude to fuck it up, you still have to also pay the salary of the guy arguing with Claude.
> The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans.
You can easily pay humans $20k a day and get gibberish in output. Heck, this happen all the times. This happens right now in multiple companies.
Yes sometime humans produce nice code. This happens from time to time...
You wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues.
If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
Are you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time.
And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
No, companies don’t pay people to write 100k LOC. They pay people to write useful software.
We figured out that LOC was a useless productivity metric in the 80s.
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> you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k
I fork Clang or GCC and rename it. I'll take only $10k.
My question, which I didn’t still find anybody asking: how many compilers, including but not limited to the 2 most famous, were in the training set.
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If my devs are writing that much code they're doing something wrong. Lines of code is an anti metric. That used to be commonly accepted knowledge.
It really depends on the human and the code it outputs.
I can get my 2y old child to output 100k LoC, but it won't be very good.
Your 2yr old can't build a C compiler in Rust that builds Linux.
Sorry mate, I think you're tripping.
I never said this. I think you're the one tripping mate.
Well, if these humans can cheat by taking whatever needed degree of liberty in copycat attitude to fit in the budget, I guess that a simple `git clone https://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git SomeLocalDir` is as close to $0 as one can hope to either reach. And it would end up being far more functional and reliable. But I get that big-corp overlords and their wanna-match-KPI minions will prefer an "clean-roomed" code base.
100k lines of clean, bug free, optimized, and vulnerability free code or 100k lines of outsourced slop? Two very different price points.
A compiler that can build linux.
That level of quality should be sufficient.
Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX?
No you don't. They do not exist.
Yep. Building a working C compiler that compiles Linux is an impossible task for all but the top 1% of developers. And the ones that could do it have better things to do, plus they’d want a lot more than 20K for the trouble.
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Do you think this was guided by a low quality Anthropic developer?
You can give a developer the GCC test suite and have them build the compiler backwards, which is how this was done. They literally brute forced it, most developers can brute force. It also literally uses GCC in the background... Maybe try reading the article.
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