alt Hacker NewsI wonder how knowledgeable in compilation was the engineer that attempted this. I'm pretty confident that I could produce a decent C compiler in a few weeks (or less), if given Opus 4.7 + unlimited tokens + a good test suite. (and this is not blind unsubstantiated belief in AI, I've recently rewritten a somewhat sophisticated interpreter in a week with AI; and have worked on several C++ compilers in the past, including a GCC port to a custom DSP, so I have a bit of an idea about what this would take).
But yeah, this is not a "one shot" project, none of it is. One shot doesn't work even with humans - after all, this is exactly what killed waterfall as a methodology.
Replies
yeah, the key part is that there be a human in the loop, directing and course-correcting the ai while it produces code in reasonably small and well defined stages.
> I'm pretty confident that I could produce a decent C compiler in a few weeks (or less), if given Opus 4.7 + unlimited tokens + a good test suite.
Of course. The point is that a full, detailed spec isn't enough (even in the rare situations it does exist, like for a C compiler). At least for the moment, you need expert humans to supervise and direct the agents.
Vibe coders usually also let the agents write the tests, which mean that the only independent human validation of the software is some cursory manual inspection. That also obviously isn't enough to validate software.
> One shot doesn't work even with humans - after all, this is exactly what killed waterfall as a methodology.
You can one-shot a C compiler with humans. LLMs' software development ability is impressive and helpful, but it is not human-level yet, even if at some tasks the agents are better than most human programmers. And while many waterfall projects failed, many succeeded (although perhaps not as efficiently as they could have). So far I don't believe agents have been able to produce any non-trivial production software autonomously.