"Anthropic proudly claimed its team of 16 Claude Opus 4.6 agents had written a Rust-based C compiler from scratch without any access to the internet. Really? That's meant to impress me? Sure, as Anthropic claims, the AI-created C compiler can compile this, that, and the other thing. Yes, even Doom. But so what? The C language is 53 years old. That's older than many of you."
"The C ecosystem has torture‑test suites that encode the subtleties of the language. There are gold‑standard reference compilers, GCC and Clang, to compare against at every step. In addition, I have no doubt that all the many open source C compilers and tools were already in Claude's LLM. How could they not be? Saying it didn't access the internet is like a student saying: "I had copies of the code I was working on, but I'd turned my Wi-Fi off.""
Anthropic reported that sixteen Claude Opus 4.6 agents produced a Rust-based C compiler from scratch without internet access. The compiler reportedly compiles large projects, including Linux and Doom. The C language has extensive, decades-old test suites and reference compilers like GCC and Clang. Large language models likely contain many existing open-source compilers and tools. Claiming no internet access does not remove prior embedded code. Computer science undergraduates commonly build C compilers, and instructional resources exist. The Anthropic effort reportedly cost about $20,000 and exhibited practical failures such as not locating the system C library path, preventing even Hello World compilation.
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