Re:The Flash C Compiler
by ndiddy on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:55AM
(#50405078)
I looked at the Github page and of course it's vibe coded. This is the sort of project that someone would have spent a few months doing as a learning exercise while they were reading through something like Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler" series. I don't see the point of vibe coding it. You still end up with a toy compiler that nobody will actually use, except now you haven't learned anything about how compilers work. It's pointless.
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I imagine I’d learn a fair bit about how to go about vibe-coding developer tools by implementing this, so it hardly seems pointless? It seems like an interesting exercise.
Re:The Flash C Compiler
by flykespice on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:33AM
(#50405404)
Yep, and the code is an eyesore to look at. Almost no logical separation of code blocks (everything mashed-up together) I was really expecting LLM to annotate every line of code with (useless) comments, considering many vibecoded js projects are like that.
Either my C skills are getting rusty and that is how a C codebase normally looks like, or LLM was trained on some suspicious codebases.
No you're right, this code is terrible. Running a linter like clang-tidy would surface many issues. Not sure why the LLM didn't think of ever doing that.
I checked a few source files at random and it looked fine to me overall. It's broken down into small-to-medium sized functions, contrary to what you suggest.
Wait, I had a look and this looks really like any other C code base to me. I even think it's unlikely this is LLM-generated?! The presence of some large functions, for example, is a sign of human-generated code, LLMs tend to be strongly opposed to that, unlike C programmers.
Re:The Flash C Compiler
by lelanthran on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:03PM
(#50406085)
> I even think it's unlikely this is LLM-generated?!
The commits were done by Claude.
Doesn’t mean humans didn’t write anything.
This is how a C codebase looks like.
LLMs are very good at copying best practices.
Re:The Flash C Compiler
by small_model on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:18AM
(#50405760)
Agree, I worked through 'Writing a C Compiler' book (I used Zig) and it was enlightening and fun. Asking AI to do it is pointless.
Exactly. Some "Prolog interpreter in Tcl" is a prompt away in LLMs but what's the point of inferring and dumping it on github? Same goes for any vibe-coded project.
Vibe code means the human did not look at the code: how do you know that's true?
It's easily to spot a code base that's build LLM-assisted. But to know that no human actually took interest in the code is hard to know without talking to the humans that prompted the LLM.
It's not hard to know - vibe-coding is the default mode for all LLM coding so one can just assume as much absent evidence to the contrary.
The blogpost about the compiler is AI written, the README file in the Github repo is AI written, all the documentation is AI written, the reverse engineering analysis of Borland Turbo C++ is AI written, all the comments in the code are AI written, and every single commit in the repo was done by Claude. I don't think it's reasonable to say that the author took any serious interest in the code.