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This is what Anthropic did with agents and $20k to write a C compiler that survived gcc’s torture suite. But the LLM knew:

1. What a C compiler was

2. What a C compiler looked like

3. What the C compiler had to do at runtime to pass gcc’s torture suite through some sort of collaborative iteration (compile, run, did it get stuck at some torture suite test or fail?)

Remove 1 and 2, or replace it with imperfect business logic, and you’re left with a system that is built to _only_ pass the tests you supply it, or in the most extreme case, print(“unit and functional tests pass!”)


It was also trained on gcc and clang.

Before 2023 I remember everyone here on HN championed that removing lines of code was the strongest senior metric

arent they still? or at least a lot. its too much current to win the swim race against the deluge of llm LOC. but i also disagree with some of the things the author just casually lays out, which is whether the LLMs can write good code. they write working code, but it looks written by a demogorgon and i get a bit ill seeing it. its bad but not bad in a way that a human would ever write, like i dont get that kind of sick reading spaghetti code written by new devs. it's a kind of sick like cthulhus eggs are hatching somewhere in your guts.

Removing lines of code without removing functionality.

Simplification is still good. I remember one senior that only removed code when he joined the company I was at until he became a manager!

Ok, I like the idea and support that seniors value simplicity ... but how the hell do you stay employed for even a month (let alone until "manager time") without writing any code?

You don't just delete stuff… it's more that your pull requests remove more lines than they add. But I'm sure the person you're replying to is exaggerating, or they got promoted because of completely unrelated reasons.

It’s pretty common for me to deliver a feature while removing more lines than I added in React. Just so many useless useEffects and states and divs. The caveat is I have to be allowed to refactor related code.

I find it’s less common for me in ruby, even refactoring bad ruby. Sure I can remove lines but bad JS/React balloons so fast.

My current org values this and my direct boss constantly praises those of us that try to remove more lines than we add. Very refreshing.


I’ve always wanted a git with five commands, and maybe with AST based diffing

The five command part isn't really possible but you can use custom diffs for merges, git diff, etc. pretty easily. There are projects like diffsitter ( https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter ) for doing more intelligent diffs like this for supported languages.

EDIT: and then an example for the merge stuff I couldn't find while typing before: https://mergiraf.org/ and HN discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42093756


Five is enough. Beagle uses five HTTP verbs: GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH. And it is syntax-aware.

https://replicated.wiki/blog/uris.html


clone, pull, push, branch, merge, add, commit are the ones I use, but that's 7

fetch, rebase, blame?

checkout, log, config?

And reflog when you make a mistake.

I had wanted the same thing for a long time and jj + difftastic has satisfied me.

How does jj handle problems described in the lore website? I'm curious. I thought jj didn't have any goals about large binary files

I can’t remember the last time anyone actually played the game they got for free on epic’s store

Citizen Sleeper, the game that is going free tomorrow on the Epic store is really good. Space Cyberpunk themed RPG/Survival Sim.

It is interesting that people are so cynical about Epic giving out free games. I get that people love Steam, but competition in the storefront market is not bad.


> It is interesting that people are so cynical about Epic giving out free games.

It's a mischaracterization to call the games free, if they require you to install unrelated third-party software you'd rather not install (and which at least in the past has been known to snoop your data without consent). In that sense, you may see it as backlash around characterizing the games as free in the first place, when they obviously are not.


> they require you to install unrelated third-party software you'd rather not install (and which at least in the past has been known to snoop your data without consent).

can you elaborate pls? I'm a little not in context


Does it support Linux?

Kerbal Space Program, Civilization 6, Hogwarts Legacy. All games nobody ever played…

I've been getting them for years now and have enjoyed many of them (though not a large percentage), and would love to use the Epic store more, if only they would implement some version of reviews/scores. Without that, I feel that I can't trust them as a marketplace.

I definitely have. But they're all the games that they gave out in the early days, the more recent games haven't really appealed to me. And it didn't convince me to spend any money, I still haven't spent a single cent on anything Epic Games.

I play Brotato fairly often. I am not sure I have played any of the other free games I’ve gotten though.

i've paid for brotato (Its a pretty good game, it was worth my money) and played city skylines (which i haven't paid for due to its excessive amount of dlcs)

They gave away Death Stranding awhile ago, and I hear that one is good, which I don't dispute given its Kojima origins.

But Kojima games require me to be in a very specific mood and I have been trying to work my way up to it.


I played hogwarts legacy for about an hour before realising it was boring, does that count?

Are you okay? They were teenagers. We were all there and we all tried. The logistics of having 7 billion people quarantine while international flights and asymptomatic carriers carried on made it _impossible_ to not play out like it did

~5 years above two comments would have had totally flipped karma/flagging

In January 2021, the date from the article, it was a totally different scenario from early in the pandemic in Northern Italy. Calling these students murderers is a little histrionic at best.

[flagged]


This is obviously you on another account. What are you trying to accomplish?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not (BLM riot). If you truly believe large gatherings were murder ("killed his grandma") then why would you excuse people doing so just to signal support for BLM?

I expect similar headlines like “I saved on token cost by hiring juniors” to come in soon too

How close was it technically to Jak2? I consider that the defining technical mastery of that generation

I would consider Jak 3 to be even better than that BUT the darker art direction really hid a lot of what it was doing. Shame really.

Hard numbers, no. Even high level concepts and theory you need to triangulate and prompt in different angles, across different models, and figure out what overlaps to build a mental mode that’s - even then - roughly 80% correct. It’s better than google, but the information isn’t free

But what about Geico?

It's so easy a grug brain can do it.

It’s time to bring back all the old software hacks that were so common in the 90s



They’d have killed today if they were AI first


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