Being on Team Words Mean Things is difficult these days, particularly when multibillion-dollar companies put out breathless press releases saying "By using our massive language model, whose training data includes every version of GCC ever released, and having it autocorrect its own output by testing it against GCC, we managed to make a C compiler that mostly works for only $20,000 in a week and gosh I have so many feelings."

I mean, what the fuck are we even doing here.

anthropic.com/engineering/buil

The fix was to use GCC as an online known-good compiler oracle to compare against. I wrote a new test harness that randomly compiled most of the kernel using GCC, and only the remaining files with Claude's C Compiler. If the kernel worked, then the problem wasn’t in Claude’s subset of the files. If it broke, then it could further refine by re-compiling some of these files with GCC. This let each agent work in parallel, fixing different bugs in different files, until Claude's compiler could eventually compile all files. (After this worked, it was still necessary to apply delta debugging techniques to find pairs of files that failed together but worked independently.)

Great news everyone thanks to my significant advances in modern algorithmic analysis I am personally able to outperform a warehouse full of specialized GPUs by five orders of magnitude with a single ARM core for one one-millionth the cost in 0.1% of the time by training the "cp(1)" command on only the GCC source and then compiling the output of that program with GCC.

The resulting compiler - which I'm calling "mhoyecc", or as I've taken to calling it, mhoye plus cc, passes 100% of GCC's tests.

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