[lubujackson]

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.

[ajross]

> $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.

[lionkor]

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.

[pcloadlett3r]

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.

[a456463]

Humans can hack a compiler in much less. Stop reading this hype and focus on learning

[Philpax]

> $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.