Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works, by examining languages, abstractions, hardware, and the boundary between human intent and machine execution.
Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.3 Codex produce some amazing results if you spend a lot of time scoping, speccing and testing each stage. Just throwing it over the wall with a low-effort prompt isn’t going to get you anything that’s very good. But time spent on the leadup and close monitoring of the results can give you production-ready code with little tech debt in it, extremely quickly and without a lot of money (energy) spent on inference.
Just today, I asked GPT5 mini for a little side project to give me a python function that returns the access rights to a given file/folder, using smbprotocol. For me, that read as a pretty concise ask, but the results were always using functions/attributes that didn’t exist.
Any time I’ve asked for scripts, it’s been flawless and way more than I asked for, usually with switches like --host, key, auth etc. But I’m using at least Sonnet if not Opus. I’d punch out a script for you with it but I have nothing that uses SMB in my network to test on.
If you’re going to use GPT, you want 5.2-Coder at least, and honestly I’m not as impressed with OpenAI’s products as other people seem to be.
Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.3 Codex produce some amazing results if you spend a lot of time scoping, speccing and testing each stage. Just throwing it over the wall with a low-effort prompt isn’t going to get you anything that’s very good. But time spent on the leadup and close monitoring of the results can give you production-ready code with little tech debt in it, extremely quickly and without a lot of money (energy) spent on inference.
Now downvote away.
Just today, I asked GPT5 mini for a little side project to give me a python function that returns the access rights to a given file/folder, using smbprotocol. For me, that read as a pretty concise ask, but the results were always using functions/attributes that didn’t exist.
Any time I’ve asked for scripts, it’s been flawless and way more than I asked for, usually with switches like --host, key, auth etc. But I’m using at least Sonnet if not Opus. I’d punch out a script for you with it but I have nothing that uses SMB in my network to test on.
If you’re going to use GPT, you want 5.2-Coder at least, and honestly I’m not as impressed with OpenAI’s products as other people seem to be.