Comment by anonymous908213
9 hours ago
I notice you haven't touched that repo once since the month you prompted for it. I don't doubt that you generated some cute little prototype that compiles something. I do doubt that it's something actually suitable for anybody to use for programming. My own experiments with having frontier models attempt to implement my own language have all been dire. Even with a rigorous specification and a set of hand-written programs showing both the input of my language and the asm it should output, it managed to create something that compiles exactly those programs and completely fails in real-world use beyond that. So too with Claude's own C compiler experiment; even with C's unbelievably rigorous test suites that give it a deterministic guideline and actionable feedback every time it fucks up, it was still shit. If they merely gave it a C specification, without the decades of human-written tests, there is a snowball's chance in hell it would produce anything worth using.
I think you answered your own problem: telling it what assembly you're expecting, get it to build the foundation before you start asking it how the tiles should look.
Right now I'm working on a compiler / runtime for a more complicated language than Python or C and while its "slower" I know that once it's done through this run I'll be able to have it focus on optimizations, especially with rigorous tests that some languages have to test their compilers. I have plans to run back to Culebral, but I have to scratch a bigger itch I've had, people like you who've told me repeatedly that an LLM cannot be used to build a compiler. So here I am, slowly chugging at it, getting decades of developer effort worked through every week.
If I'm wrong, so be it, if I'm right, it'll be fun to release. :)
It doesn't take a decade to write a compiler for a language. If you're putting months of your own effort into it, it's not clear that the LLM is even increasing your productivity.