Name: The Real Reason Anthropic built a Compiler
Uploaded: 2026-02-19T01:14:54.000Z
Duration: 8 min 18 s
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Adverbs of degree

Anthropic just released a marketing video proving that Claude, their flagship programming model, can produce a C compiler from scratch.

And they can do it in parallel and it can compile Linux, SQLite, Redis, Lua and even Doom.

This is going to be a weird video because I'm going to say something positive about Anthropic and then I'm also going to call Anthropics one of the most deceitful companies I have ever seen.

This little product demo that they did, the language inside the video, it is the most dishonest framing of what they actually did versus what they're saying they did.

Anthropic and its non stop hyping of the AI models is perhaps one of the most annoying features of 2025 and it's coming into 2026 with a whole new level of rigor and, and

All right, so let's go over what they did, what the actual cool part and actually why.

What they did was complete hype, nonsense.

Software engineering is in fact not over quite yet.

Now that video that you just got done saying there's so many lies into it.

So we're going to just try, we're going to try our best to kind of take apart the lie.

So first off, the thing that they were actually building was, was trying to see can they get CLAUDE to run by itself long enough to produce a functional piece of software.

Functional of course just means that it can do what it says it does regardless of how good it does it.

Long as at the end of the day you say do X, it does X, you compile Linux, it should produce Linux as an artifact.

Also put a little star on that because that even that not so true.

All right, the article kind of kicks off with two test dress it.

Now it being this multi agent harness to be able to have Claude run autonomously for multiple weeks, I tasked 16 agents with writing a Rust based C compiler from scratch capable of compiling the Linux kernel over nearly 2,000 Claude code sessions and $20,000 worth of API cost.

The agent produced a 100,000 line compiler that can build Linux 6.9 on X, 86 ARB and RISC V.

Well first off, I don't know if you know this, but

gcc, which is what they're basing this off of, not Only is it open source, which means that they've already trained on top of it.

And we all know if, in case you didn't know that these models you can produce nearly perfect identical copyright works back out of them if you can convince them to produce it.

Like this one right here, showing that Claude3.7 can produce 95.8% of the first book of Harry Potter only almost a near verbatim reproduction, but

When starting from scratch, scratch meant 37 years of developed torture.

Test suite from GCC yes, you know this classic way of doing software development.

Usually when I start a new project, I first get handed 37 years of prior art in which contains the perfect golden test suite so that I can test my new project in every conceivable way possible.

And then on top of it I have the actual working version of the thing I'm about to build that I can also test my working version against.

And that's known as the online Oracle, as we, as we say in this software biz.

Also, when I say I can compile Linux from scratch, I want you to understand that it lacks a 16 bit x86 compiler necessary to boot Linux out of the real mode.

That's because OPUS was unable to implement a 16bit x86 code generated needed to boot into 16bit real mode.

While the compiler can output the correct 16bit x86 via the 66 and 67 opcode prefixes, the resulting compiled output is over 60kb, far exceeding the 32k code limit enforced by Linux.

Like they have this stupid 32 bit maximum number on.

All right, so to say that all in a quick sentence, they started a project from scratch, having every single conceivable test and a way to test it under all conditions.

They had an online version of it, GCC online, to be able to call out to, to validate everything they've done.

And lastly, they couldn't actually make Linux boot because they were unable to produce an artifact small enough.

So they built a compiler completely from scratch in two weeks and they just had to walk away.

They also couldn't walk away during those two weeks because sometimes it did things and it would crash itself and we had to restart it and make sure things were working.

And this is exactly what I mean by dishonesty.

It's like, yeah, dude, we said, hey, Claude, you'll build this from scratch.

Two weeks later, Linux was working, Sequel Light was working, Redis was working.

Like, okay, so the real takeaway, which everybody should have, which is what is triggering me and making me so angry again at Anthropic, is that the real cool thing is that they figured out how to get 16 agents to mostly run by themselves for two weeks straight and actually produce something given the correct guidelines.

At the end of the day, hey, that's pretty cool.

It shows that models are in fact improving and can handle confidence, kind of context up to this size and able to kind of work together given the right orchestration.

Like, that's a neat takeaway, but that's not what they said.

Which of course led to hilarious issues on GitHub.

Like the very first issue, hello world does not compile.

Because it turns out the example program that they put in their readme does not compile.

Okay, you think you just get those for free?

Which, by the way, there's like 300 and some comments on here of just people arguing back and forth.

And of course I'm not the only person saying this.

There are some other people saying, hey, this is kind of ridiculous.

This is a little out of, like out of pocket here, calling this from scratch and no human intervention.

So at the end of the day, this could have been an article about how we got Claude to run for multiple weeks and produce something with very little to.

To almost none human interaction and being able to fulfill a spec.

But instead it became a spectacle about how anthropic, yet again is completely dishonest.

This is just another example of the AI hype cycle.

They're just here to try to raise money and to take every piece of novel work possible and sell it back to you.

Now, this is a future I'm personally excited about.

If you were just, like, a little bit more honest about what you're doing, honestly, I think a lot of people would be much more excited about it and probably cheer you on from the sideline.

There's a lot of cool stuff about AI we don't have to be AI haters.

But sometimes you just say the stupidest crap ever and just do the stupidest stuff and make everybody hate you.

How about you just don't do that anymore?