Comment by jaen

Not exactly a counterpoint, since nobody argued that LLMs can not produce "original" code from specs at all - just that this particular exercise was not clean room.

(although for SAKO [1], it's an average 1960 programming language, just with keywords in Polish, so it's certainly almost trivial for an LLM to produce an interpreter, since construction via analogy is the bread and butter of LLMs. Also, such interpreters tend to have an order of magnitude less complexity than emulators.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKO_(programming_language)