I mean - who would honestly expect an LLM to be able to compete with a compiler with 40 years of development behind it? Even more if you count the collective man years expended in that time. The Claude agents took two weeks to produce a substandard compiler, under the fairly tight direction of a human who understood the problem space.

At the same time - you could direct Claude to review the register spilling code and the linker code of both LLVM/gcc for potential improvements to CCC and you will see improvements. You can ask it not to copy GPL code verbatim but to paraphrase and tell it it can rip code from LLVM as long as the licenses are preserved. It will do it.

You might only see marginal improvements without spending another $100K on API calls. This is about one of the hardest projects you could ask it to bite off and chew on. And would you trust the compiler output yet over GCC or LLVM?

Of course not.

But I wager, that if you _started_ with the LLVM/gcc codebases and asked it to look for improvements - it might be surprising to see what it finds.

Both sides have good arguments. But this could be a totally different ball game in 2, 5 and 10 years. I do feel like those who are most terrified by it are those whose identity is very much tied to being a programmer, and seeing the potential for their role to be replaced and I can understand that.

Me personally - I'm relieved I finally have someone else to blame and shout at rather than myself for the bugs in the software I produce. I'm relieved that I can focus now on the more creative direction and design of my personal projects (and even some work projects on the non-critical paths) and not get bogged down in my own perfectionism with respect to every little component until reaching exhaustion and giving up.

And I'm fascinated by the creativity of some of the projects I see that are taking the same mindset and approach.

I was depressed by it at first. But as I've experimented more and more, I've come to enjoy seeing things that I couldn't ever have achieved even with 100 man years of my own come to fruition.