Writing a "clear room" Z80 and Spectrum emulator with Claude Code
16 hours ago
- #Clean Room Experiment
- #Emulator Development
- #AI Programming
- Anthropic's experiment involved instructing Opus 4.6 to write a C compiler in Rust under a 'clean room' setup, raising questions about methodology and lack of ISA documentation.
- The author conducted a similar experiment by creating a Z80 and ZX Spectrum emulator, emphasizing the importance of providing detailed documentation and rules for the AI.
- Claude Code autonomously produced a functional Z80 emulator in 1200 lines of well-commented C code, passing ZEXDOC and ZEXALL tests without human intervention.
- The process included gathering specifications, documenting requirements, and ensuring no internet access or external code contamination, mimicking human programming practices.
- For the ZX Spectrum emulator, extensive design notes were provided, focusing on embedded system constraints, leading to a successful implementation with minimal CPU usage.
- The AI demonstrated super-human capabilities by integrating diverse programming skills, debugging, and incremental feature implementation.
- A CP/M environment was also implemented successfully, showcasing the AI's ability to handle additional complexity with minimal guidance.
- Key lessons include the necessity of thorough documentation, design hints, and structured rules for AI coding tasks to achieve high-quality results.
- The experiment challenges the notion that LLMs merely memorize and regurgitate code, showing they can synthesize new solutions from provided information.
- Future steps could involve comparing results with and without provided documentation to further understand AI's autonomous coding capabilities.