About whether LLMs can act like compilers from English to verifiable code.
Has this happened?
Yes 52 (42%)Not sure 30 (24%)No 43 (34%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether LLMs can act like compilers from English to verifiable code.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
There are 4 important components to describing a compiler. The source language, the target language, and the meaning (semantics in compiler-speak) of both those languages.
We call a C->asm compiler "correct" if the meaning of every valid C program turns into an assembly program with equivalent meaning.
The reason LLMs don't work like other compilers is not that they're non-deterministic, it's that the source language is ambiguous.
LLMs can never be "correct" compilers, because there's no definite meaning assigned to english. Even if english had precise meaning, LLMs will never be able to accurately turn any arbitary english description into a C program.
Imagine how painful development would be if compilers produced incorrect assembly for 1% of all inputs.