alt Hacker NewsThe purpose of this project is not to create a state-of-the-art C compiler on par with projects that represent tens of thousands of developer-years. The goal is to assess the current capabilities of a largely autonomous software-building pipeline: it's not yet limitless, but better than it was. What a shocker.
I’ve had my share of build errors while compiling the Linux kernel for custom targets, so I wouldn’t be so sure that linker errors on x86_64 can’t be fixed with changes to the build script.
> The goal is to assess the current capabilities of a largely autonomous software-building pipeline: it's not yet limitless, but better than it was. What a shocker.
Of course, but we're trying to assess the capabilities by looking at the LLM output as if it were a program written by a person. If someone told me to check out their new C compiler that can build the kernel, I'd assume that other basic things, such as not compiling incorrect programs, are already pretty much covered. But with an LLM we can't assume that. We need to really check what's happening and not trust the agent's word for it.
And the reason why it's important it's because we really need to check whether it's actually "better than it was" or just "doing things incorrectly for longer". Let's say your goal was writing a gcc replacement. Does this autonomous pipeline get you closer? Or does it just get you farther away through the wrong path? Considering that it's full of bugs and incomplete implementations and cannot be changed without things breaking down, I'd say it seems to be the latter.