Type: url
Original: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler
Status: partial
Summary
An Anthropic engineering post (Feb 2026) describing an experiment in which 16 parallel Claude Opus 4.6 instances, run in an infinite loop with minimal human supervision, built a 100,000-line Rust-based C compiler able to build Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM and RISC-V over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and about $20,000 in API costs. It focuses on lessons for designing harnesses for long-running autonomous agent teams: near-perfect tests, keeping output from polluting context, making parallelism easy (including using GCC as a known-good oracle), and specialized agent roles, and it lists the compiler’s remaining limitations and the author’s unease about deploying unverified software.