Our toughest challenges include cross-compiling to Windows or ARM64 and resurrecting 22-year-old source code from 2003 on modern systems. Some agents needed 135 commands and 15 minutes just to produce a single working binary.
I found that "just" there to be so funny in terms of how far the goal posts moved over these last few years (as TFA does mention). I personally am certain that it would have taken me significantly longer than that to do it myself.
And here's me, after 4 straight days of wrangling an obscure cross-compilation toolchain to resurrect some ill-fated piece of software from year 2011 in a modern embedded environment.
Letting an agent figure out how to compile old projects is magical. What used to be multiple days of slog is now “compile this, make changes and download tools as needed” with 10 mins of git review to make sure it didn’t do anything stupid.
Given the amount of time I've spent wrestling toolchain unpleasantness, particularly for old or embedded systems, I will happily go take a fifteen-minute coffee break while the bot does it for me.
Of course, I will probably do this with OpenAI's option, not $20 of Anthropic API credits.
man I dunno, I was expecting some magic but the tasks seem to boil down to untar, configure with some flags, make install
it does seem the machine is faster than me since I would have to spend a minute to copy each of the --disable-whatever flags for curl
it's somewhat cool to see a computer can do the same half-assed process I do of seeing what linker failures happen and googling for the missing lib flag
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I found that "just" there to be so funny in terms of how far the goal posts moved over these last few years (as TFA does mention). I personally am certain that it would have taken me significantly longer than that to do it myself.
15 minutes?
And here's me, after 4 straight days of wrangling an obscure cross-compilation toolchain to resurrect some ill-fated piece of software from year 2011 in a modern embedded environment.
Letting an agent figure out how to compile old projects is magical. What used to be multiple days of slog is now “compile this, make changes and download tools as needed” with 10 mins of git review to make sure it didn’t do anything stupid.
Given the amount of time I've spent wrestling toolchain unpleasantness, particularly for old or embedded systems, I will happily go take a fifteen-minute coffee break while the bot does it for me.
Of course, I will probably do this with OpenAI's option, not $20 of Anthropic API credits.
man I dunno, I was expecting some magic but the tasks seem to boil down to untar, configure with some flags, make install
it does seem the machine is faster than me since I would have to spend a minute to copy each of the --disable-whatever flags for curl
it's somewhat cool to see a computer can do the same half-assed process I do of seeing what linker failures happen and googling for the missing lib flag