Sixteen Claude AI agents working together created a new C compiler
Ars Technica • • business
Key Points:
- Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini used 16 instances of the Claude Opus 4.6 AI model to autonomously develop a 100,000-line Rust-based C compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel across multiple architectures, completing the project over two weeks with nearly 2,000 code sessions and $20,000 in API fees.
- The AI agents operated independently without an orchestration agent, managing tasks through a shared Git repository and resolving merge conflicts autonomously; the resulting compiler successfully compiled major open source projects and passed 99% of the GCC torture test suite.
- Despite these achievements, the compiler has notable limitations, including reliance on GCC for certain tasks, buggy assembler and linker components, and less efficient
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