Vish Abrams

Distinguished Engineer at Google. Previously NASA Nebula Technical Lead during the creation of OpenStack. Opinions are my own.

[Vish Abrams @vish]

1/ I got nerd-sniped by a C++ compiler course 13 years ago and quit when the next step turned into a tedious parser refactor. A few months ago I handed the old code to Codex. It finished the refactor in about an hour.

[Vish Abrams @vish]

@anotherjesse I have not. I’ve tweaked the prompts and the spec a lot to get better results and in my interactive optimization passes I have encouraged trying ambitious ideas

[Vish Abrams @vish]

1/ I've been working on a scaffold to teach an agent how to build a self-hosting C++ Compiler from scratch for the past 6 months. My reference implementation can now compile C++ code 4x faster than GCC and Clang

[Vish Abrams @vish]

4/ I'm going to tackle rust compile times next. All of the details are in https://t.co/hqspmBKzJY

[Vish Abrams @vish]

3/ My most recent gpt-6.1-astra run achieved self-hosting for less than $500 in API costs. If you want give your agent/harness a shot, the scaffold is at https://t.co/dqA9djJKkf

[Vish Abrams @vish]

@thsottiaux I can now build a fully self-hosting c++ compiler from scratch with gpt-6.1-sol for $455 in 85 hours: https://t.co/hqspmBKzJY

[Vish Abrams @vish]

@anotherjesse It’s going and looking good. Just waiting on my weekly quota reset 🤣

[Vish Abrams @vish]

2/ With post-run optimizations I'm within 50% of the performance of gcc/clang. Further runs will hopefully bring that down. Lot's to learn here about long-horizon agentic work. See all the details in https://t.co/z5AbAjfqLP

[Vish Abrams @vish]

1/ Update from my agent-built c++ compiler project: I've had multiple end-to-end runs that reach self-hosting with no-human intervention. One was good enough for me to completely replace my reference implementation.

[Vish Abrams @vish]

@jessfraz I’m continually impressed with how persistent codex will be with a well defined task with a clear tracker. I’ve seen multiple 24h+ loops. So yeah, autist grey beard resonates.

[Vish Abrams @vish]

9/ I wrote the whole thing up in four parts, including the repos if you want to run your own agent through the suite: https://t.co/DZIngR7P5a

[Vish Abrams @vish]

1/ I got nerd-sniped by a C++ compiler course 13 years ago and quit when the next step turned into a tedious parser refactor. A few months ago I handed the old code to Codex. It finished the refactor in about an hour.

[Vish Abrams @vish]

8/ My current read: agents handle tedium well. They also take the easy path. Humans need contracts and gates that make that path land in the right place.

[Heroku @heroku]

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about 12-Factor, this is the episode of Code[ish] to listen to!

Let special guest @vish tell you more and get to the heart of 12-Factor. 🎙️