A project that would take a small engineering team months was just completed in two weeks. By AI. For $20,000.
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini designed a testing harness, pointed 16 AI agents at a single task, and stepped back.
The project was to build a compiler from scratch. A compiler turns human code into instructions a machine can run. No internet. No human supervision. Make it compile the Linux operating system.
Over 2,000 automated sessions later, they had written 100,000 lines of code. The compiler builds Linux on three chip architectures. It still leans on older tools for a few low-level steps.
This isn’t “AI replaced compilers.” It’s further than anyone expected to get this early. It can even compile and run Doom, the video game.
The previous model, released months earlier, could pass test suites but choked on real-world projects. The one before that could barely manage a compiler at all.
This is the rate of change. It’s not just about what AI can do today. It’s about how much better it got in ninety days.
— ♻️ Repost if you’re tracking the ‘unreasonable’ speed of AI development.
