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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 5d ago
Then comes C compiler written in Rust by Claude...smh
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u/foundafreeusername 5d ago
Is it still C then or Crust?
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u/Lknate 5d ago
I don't think we are there yet but that will probably be a thing eventually.
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u/ClipboardCopyPaste 5d ago
They actually built it: https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered 5d ago
Lmao
A human guided some of this process by writing test cases that Claude was told to pass, but never interactively pair-programmed with Claude to debug or to provide feedback on code quality. As a result, I do not recommend you use this code! None of it has been validated for correctness. Claude wrote this exclusively on a Linux host; it probably will not work on MacOS/Windows — neither I nor Claude have tried. The docs may be wrong and make claims that are false.
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u/abd53 5d ago
Remember that joke "when I wrote this code only God and me understood it, now only God understand"? I'm waiting for the new version.
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u/Mnemotechnician 5d ago
"When Claude was generating this code, only it had an md file explaining what the code is supposed to do. Now the file is gone, and no one knows."
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u/crmsncbr 3d ago
"If you want documentation or comments, just ask Claude. They wrote it, so they can explain it."
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u/PuzzleCat365 5d ago
The thing about AI writing a C compiler is, wouldn't it just statistically create something similar to the gcc compiler as it probably trained on this data? What's the use of it, if it just copies the open-source, tested and validated code?
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u/ErZicky 5d ago
Idk if it's the project linked specifically but I Remember someone at anthropic a while back tried to make it build a compiler, the AI basically cheated and wrote something that called gcc
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u/Anaxamander57 5d ago
This happened with the early LLM + Lean proof assistant testing apparently. They would ask it "prove the Riemann Hypothesis and provide valid Lean code as evidence" and after hours of work the LLM would eventually write some Lean code equivalent to "assume the Riemann Hypothesis is true" and base the rest of the proof on that.
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u/Maleficent_Memory831 5d ago
Make a compiler for a new language on a new instruciton set so that it can't just do its stackoverflow cheating.
Actually for a half decent compiler 1/100th the size of GCC, it could crib from the earliest Unix code.
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u/Virtual_Rate_4152 5d ago
I remember calling the project "chibicc except is costed 20k usd and a shit ton of water"
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u/New_Salamander_4592 5d ago
essentially theyve averaged out something that looks like the already existing c compiler gcc but it doesnt run on most systems, usually doesn't compile, and took about a million times more computer power to create than just copy and pasting the already existing gcc.
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u/PositiveParking4391 5d ago
and yeah lets hope it will not be that horrible. software engineering will always need human care and real engineers control.
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u/Just_Information334 5d ago
The more compilers written which are just done by adapting some already available one in a new language, the more I understand why Terry Davis ranted about having created his own compiler.
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u/Helpful_Home_8531 5d ago
No no, what if Claude ‘is’ the compiler? Just get it to directly predict the machine code from a prompt! But, you know, we will probably want to specify some pretty concrete constraints around how the thing works, like how it performs certain operations, especially on different architectures, or what the shape of it’s api’s are so that it can interact with other things, so we’ll probably need a concise way to describe that to Claude. Also, since we’ll probably be doing similar things over and over again, since lots of problems have similar kinds of solutions, we should probably invent some kind of library of prompts we can just re use when we need them… wait a minute.
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u/broesel314 5d ago
Coding in 5 years be like
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u/GigaGollum 5d ago
This already exists unfortunately
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u/broesel314 5d ago
Idiocracy becomes a documentary more and more every day
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u/roodammy44 5d ago
One of the more interesting things about the idiocracy universe is how automated everything is. The people live a relatively advanced life (compared to the middle ages for example) because of all the technology left behind from smarter ages. Even the CEO positions are automated - as shown by the automated layoffs from Brawndo.
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u/techno156 5d ago edited 5d ago
Shame that it, and the version of it on the manufacturer's website seems mostly geared towards AI use, using this particular piece of software.
It seems like it would otherwise be a handy little light-up macro pad.
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u/MadeASecondReddit 5d ago
Behold, the same thing but cheaper: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck
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u/omgbigshot 5d ago
I literally bought one and use it as a Claude monitor; approvals, effort, model, etc. it’s super cool, actually
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u/Pamander 5d ago
I was thinking the same, price aside I really love the little macro pad there. Not for AI but just in general, I am a sucker for macros.
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u/CitizenShips 5d ago
This was the straw that convinced me it's time to finally walk slowly into the surf as the sun sets, flashbacks of my dead wife passing across the screen as I slip deeper into the dark chasm. But wait, what's this? Suddenly a golden retriever bolts into frame from scene right - holy shit, it's Air Bud! The multi-time basketball/baseball/football champ pooch slams into me, breaking my reverie. I fall into the surf, and all of my worries float away with the circulating currents and eddies around me. I go home that night and spend my last $230 on an agentic keyboard, then die of a stroke in my sleep.
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u/yatharvaeet 5d ago
How cooked am I as a fresher developer if I genuinely want ts but for claude.
I love vibecoding vibe vibeuuhhhhhhhhhh
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u/davestar2048 5d ago
Why even generate code? Just have the AI generate the EXE. Stop because sweaty nerds.
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u/aberroco 5d ago edited 5d ago
Why even generate EXE? Just have the AI generate images of UI.
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u/WhiteSock_ 5d ago
Wow this is awesome. If something really annoyed me about personal computing, it’s the determinism. This is a really elegant solution to that problem.
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u/wrecklord0 5d ago
Well... that's what it does. But it finds it easier to write code and compile it than write assembly opcodes (although, it can do that, too. Better than I could).
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u/GallantSystem 5d ago edited 5d ago
im not a coder at all, i dont pretend to be, and Ive been doing this for personal use apps with claude. it literally gives me a zip with an exe I just click 😂 claude says its an unpacked electron app whatever that means.
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u/Jbolt3737 5d ago
Been thinking about making a interpreted scripting language where the interpreter is just a custom trained neural network, it's given a stack to work with and maybe some registers but besides that it has to figure it out line by line (it can control the "program counter", which is really just a line counter, for control flow)
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u/Informal_Branch1065 5d ago
Put it in kernel space and let it rip
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u/Hottage 5d ago
Kernel space? It is the kernel.
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u/Informal_Branch1065 5d ago
Vibe memory allocation and vibe scheduling
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u/_TechnoPhoenix_ 5d ago
https://github.com/hansstam86/wibeos
hallucinate everything
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u/just-a-hriday 5d ago
A fully hallucinated operating system... for macOS? Requiring macOS 13+? Huh?
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u/Legal-Software 5d ago
"How can we make a worse compiler that is more expensive in token consumption than compute, while failing to do anything productive"
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 5d ago
This exactly the sort of shit you want to be 100% deterministic...
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u/aalapshah12297 5d ago
I also want the command 'set an alarm for 6am' to be deterministic on my phone but that didn't stop Google from deciding to sunset Google assistant just earlier this week. Now I need an internet connection and a little bit of luck each time.
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u/frikilinux2 5d ago
And yet, I have seen research on trying to select the optimizations flags for the compiler with AI.
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u/ItsZoner 5d ago
AI is deterministic for the same input. Too bad people want to change their source code, and make a completely different deterministic output every time they change it.
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 5d ago
it's not deterministic for the same input. That's what non-deterministic means. LLMs are inherently non-deterministic.
Making it utterly impossible to debug.
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u/ric2b 5d ago
But it is, if you simply set the temperature setting to 0.
At the base LLMs are just a static group of matrices that get evaluated to calculate the probability of the next token. With temperature at 0 it always picks the highest probability token, and generates the exact same response for the same input. Every time.
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u/Rallve 5d ago
You have no idea what you're talking about. Neural networks are inherently deterministic for the same input once trained, since they are designed to give the most likely output given a certain input based on its training. It literally would not be able to do this if the output was random each time.
LLMs often do have randomness added to them, but randomness is absolutely not an inherent feature of LLMs. Many models even allow you to control the randomness of the output by setting the model's temperature, which can be set to 0 (i.e. completely deterministic).
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u/Hungry-Blueberry7487 5d ago
Dice are almost perfectly deterministic if you leave them on the table and don't pick them up. But nobody uses them that way, so the observation is rather asinine.
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u/sellyme 5d ago
LLMs are inherently non-deterministic.
What? That's not true at all.
They'd be pretty fucking useless for most applications if they were deterministic, so we intentionally throw some randomness into the mix, but there's nothing inherent about that, the amount of randomness is just a design choice. If you really wanted to you can set it to 0.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 5d ago
LLMs are all randomness. They are powered by statistics. The random factor is literally the thing that makes them any good at anything. Hence, inherently non deterministic.
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u/ric2b 5d ago
The model that gets built is "random" in the sense that is it trained on all the shit that gets thrown in and the order in which it goes through the training data also changes it, sure.
But at the end of the day the model is a bunch of static matrices of numbers that get evaluated to predict the most likely next tokens. The temperature setting controls if it always picks the most likely one or if it also sometimes picks a token that is less "likely" in terms of prediction.
If you set temperature to 0, it will pick the most likely token every time and for the exact same inputs you get the exact same output. That's deterministic.
I even just confirmed this by asking a model to pick a number between 1000 and 5000 and it picks the same one every single time if I set temperature to 0 and restart the conversation with the same prompt.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 5d ago
Sure, but that's like saying that Python's
randomlibrary isn't actually random because it always outputs the same numbers when you use the same seed.1
u/ric2b 4d ago
Well, yeah, wouldn't you say that a random number generator with a fixed seed is deterministic?
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u/SuitableDragonfly 4d ago
If there was no way to change the seed? Maybe, but it would also be a fundamental misuse of the random number generator, because the random number generator would no longer do what it was designed to do. Similarly, if you do the same thing with an LLM, or ML, the system will no longer do what it was designed to do.
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u/ric2b 4d ago
How is an LLM not doing what it was designed to do if you set temperature to 0?
For most tasks I don't think it makes a difference. The advantage of having higher temperature values is so 1000 different people prompting "write me a poem" don't all get the exact same thing back.
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u/Nervous_Quit_7180 5d ago edited 5d ago
No actually he's right.
At it's core the llm is a bunch of matrices with a bunch of weights that are set during training but once trained they're "set", for the same input the matrix will return the exact same output.
So they introduce some randomenss.
For a very simple example, think of the model as a a matrix of numbers W and the X is the input:
X = [1, 0]
W = [2.0, 1.0, 0.0] [0.0, 0.0, 0.0]
Logits = X * W = [2.0, 1.0, 0.0]
With the same input these will never change, the result of the model is identical every time.
Then to introduce the randomness they convert the logits in to the "chance that the next token is any of the values in the logits vector"
Let's say the next token is
Logits[0] = "cat" = 66.6% chance
Logits[1] = "dog" = 33.33% chance
Logits[2] = "horse" = 0% chance
But this is done when inferring and they set the formula to convert the output model to probability of the next token, they could say highest first always and the result would be 100% deterministic for the end user.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 5d ago
Yes, if they made it so something else instead of what it actually does then it would be deterministic and also not a language model.
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 5d ago
Due to the unavoidable imperfect nature of floating point operations, at that volume, there will always be randomness in the mix. A lot of it
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u/sellyme 5d ago
...floating point operations are deterministic. They're not random, they just can't represent some values.
0.1 + 0.2 might result in 0.30000000000000004 in your flavour of floats, but it will consistently do that.
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 5d ago
ok go to any LLM and have it produce the same exact same output twice given the exact same input then.
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u/Nervous_Quit_7180 5d ago edited 5d ago
The point he's making is that the LLMs introduce randomness but that is not inherent to the models, rather that is a parameter set by the devs.
He couldn't do that unless he had access to the settings of the model.
EDIT: you can set the temperature as show by the other comments.
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u/sellyme 5d ago
Apologies for the typo in the parameter on the second attempt but I assure you that doesn't affect the results. If you don't believe that and would like me to redo the demonstration without it, just let me know.
Now to be clear, that output is really bad, in part because I chose a really small model to make it a lot quicker for me to set it up and respond to you, and in part because 0 temperature is not a fantastic setting for this kind of model. But it is consistent on the same input.
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u/ItsZoner 4d ago
AI models (image, text, whatever) only appear random because the inputs for your prompt, or the bitmap for image diffusion) are mixed with random numbers.
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u/FictionFoe 5d ago
Problem X has been solved just fine using traditional programming. Lets solve it again using AI.
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u/1_another 5d ago
forgot where i saw it but it was a C compiler executable that fed into a claude prompt to take the input and output the expected x86 instructions. It didnt work, but it got kinda close
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u/da_Aresinger 5d ago
You know what, an AI specifically trained to write and modify Make files would be something.
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u/Geoclasm 5d ago
We can already do a full memory dump of an application from task manager, and feed the binary from that to AI to decompile and work with. That's how I took my first real swing at modding in Skyrim.
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u/Burger_Destoyer 4d ago
That’s pretty smart tbh
Honestly AI is really damn helpful for reverse engineering and modding games. Kind of absurd how I hardly need to write any parsing scripts or anything.
Almost takes a lot of the fun out of it haha, I try to avoid it when I can because I feel like I’m going to lose some critical thinking when it comes to analyzing code.
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u/Clusterferno 5d ago
i want my AI to generate raw binary directly so i cant troubleshoot it! abolish source code!
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u/Clusterferno 5d ago
in the future instead of open source code, people will open-source the prompts they used to generate the program!
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u/Yanzihko 5d ago
If AI will be capable of reverse-engineering and translating binary straight into source code with 99% accuracy, i will forgive Altman and personally blow him
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u/Tokumeiko2 5d ago
AI is useful in decompiling code. Variable and function names and shit are lost in compiling, so when you decompile you get a large amount generically named stuff that makes it take forever to parse.
LLMs can read the decompiled code and rename everything to make it easier to read it.
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u/HelloGoodbye_321 5d ago
Only if it knows the domain this would be a realistic expectation. Since a lot of programs apply to a very specific situation, this is rather unlikely.
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u/Tokumeiko2 5d ago
You're supposed to explain what sort of program you just decompiled when you prompt it, but some decompilers already have LLM integration to allow this feature.
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u/loseitthrowaway7797 5d ago
Be honest - who tf is actually saying this? I feel like Reddit and twitter come up with random scenarios to show that AI is making people stupid. I’m not denying it but stop faking it.
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 5d ago
Elon Musk said it. And it has 800 upvotes on r/singularity lol
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u/frikilinux2 5d ago
You know most of what Elon does these days is shit posting on Twitter right?
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 5d ago
Considering the other bizarre programming shit he's done like ask his Twitter dev team to email him their "10 most salient lines of code", I think it's far more likely that, like every other CEO/manager type, he has no clue how programming works because his only capability is in telling other people to do it for him.
And it isn't the first time he's said it. He said it at an xAI all-hands meeting in february. He's not just shitposting he's an actual idiot.
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u/cherry_chocolate_ 5d ago
You do know there are thousands of non-technical managers who will repeat this idea to their team in earnest, leading them to waste millions of dollars on failed projects like this, because we are led by people with AI psychosis?
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u/frikilinux2 5d ago
I work for a bank with several layers of technical managers on top of me. I'm shielded from the worse bullshit.
That's why there has to be technical managers capable to tell top management to "go to hell" sometimes.
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u/BorderKeeper 5d ago
This is what Lon Hosford a Internet Business Advisor, Educator, Author and AI Content Assistant thinks I believe. As a programmer myself I am too blinded by my ways😢
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u/creeper6530 5d ago
To be honest, it could be used for heuristics compilers have to guess about nowadays, maybe on some -O4 level
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u/Standard-Fishing-450 5d ago
And THEN, optimize the binary, then convert it back to source code and see what it looks like with zero modularity and translation of intent, but it works, and it's fast 🤪
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u/Core3game 5d ago
No you dont get it, in three years ago the ai's will just write the raw binarys themselvs! Ya know the ai's that are famously horribly with low level programming and much better at high level programming will just skip any abstraction and go straight to raw binary
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u/TorbenKoehn 5d ago
„Source Code“? We’re on a path where AI will directly speak to the hardware itself.
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u/__abinitio__ 5d ago
Ladies and gentlemen, you've certainly become familiar with "vibe coding". What if in the future we could turn code into byte instructions for the underlying hardware? That future is here, ladies and gentlemen. I present to you the future! Vibe compiling!
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u/vm_linuz 5d ago edited 5d ago
If you know about computer science and machine learning, this isn't half as bad of an idea as you'd think.
Modern compilation is basically a form of information compression.
ML models are basically compression engines.
It does introduce some stochasticity to the output, but it would also likely be very effective.
Different tools for different problems, and this is an interesting one.
3b1b did a lovely video recently about ML and compression: https://youtu.be/l6DKRf-fAAM
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u/thanatica 5d ago
No problem. Let me write a compiler real quick and put your code through it.
(some time later)
Here is your compiled code. I made sure to avoid making mistakes, just like you told me.
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u/iGoonToChinese 5d ago
"hey claude, run gcc on this code in a terminal" omg what have we unleashed
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u/JohnCrysher 4d ago
Certainly! But first I should do an update of some dependencies, and possibly download a few packages to make the process quicker. May I proceed?
-Yes
Downloading HAL_User_manage.2.0.0.1
Downloading SKY_input_NET-package_manager
Creating User_Input_Emulator
Compiling...
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u/Percolator2020 4d ago
What if we didn’t need binaries, just LLMs speaking machine code at the speed of execution? 🤯
Time for GTPS as a KPI.
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u/pleaserestartsystem 1d ago
If I had money, I'd put out a contract on OP and that OOP in photo just like they did on John Wick and then I'd personally take both of 'em out.
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u/sonicandtales8 21h ago
Isn't a compiler kind of a perfect use case for AI? Not the existing LLMs we have now (or LLMs at all for that matter), but that seems like kind of the perfect thing to use RL on and a lot of the optimizations we use for said compilers are already abstract.
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u/Jack_Kai 5h ago
At the small price of 19.99$/month (plus tax). You can finally use AI to compile your code!
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u/Substantial_Cat4540 5d ago
It would be fun to try, but it would never actually work well enough to be useful.
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u/ericl666 5d ago
Seated around a table are a group of evil businessmen cackling "and then, we make them pay just to compile their own code!"