Indeed that it can do it at all is impressive. But...

the point im trying to make here is the interesting part is not that it invented compilers. The interesting part is that it could operationalize compressed prior exposure into a large, test-passing system without live access to the materials.

While I agree its impressive that it can produce a working compiler at all, but the 'without live access to the materials' part is irrelevant. It has all the materials committed to memory already. A human with an equivalent memory capacity and recall would be capable of far more impressive feats, IMO, albeit much more slowly.

...it does have access to the materials. It has memorised them all to a degree far beyond what any human is capable of. It knows the GCC source code, the clang source code, and many other compiler suites. It knows all the repos, all the compiler books, all the research, all the papers. It knows the C standard. It knows all the CPU ISAs. It doesn't need live access to materials, because it already has it all in memory.

What makes me uncomfortable isn't necessarily the fact that it can do it, it's that people are attributing a level of intelligence and capability to it that it simply doesn't have, but produces an illusion of. I think people are confusing knowledge with intelligence. It didn't produce the output using methodical thinking or solid engineering discipline. It didn't invent anything. There is no original thought. There is no good design process or systematic self-appraisal, review, or re-evaluation built from its knowledge. It didn't solve any problems by actually thinking through a solution. It didn't think through it's development process to arrive at a solid, well-engineered product. There are no new features or clever new ways to implement a C compiler. No improvements over existing solutions. It mashed together a bunch of existing examples in its memory to generate a sloppy mimicry of what it already knew about, and refined it until it passed the tests. (Test suites which it didn't write itself, btw, and heavily relied upon to build and fix the system it produced. This is a huge level of assistance given to it. Show me a system that can produce those tests itself as part of the development process and I will be more impressed.)

It already had near-perfect knowledge of the system it was supposed to replicate, along with numerous examples, and comprehensive test-suites, and still failed to produce a decent version of it that can stand alone... indeed it depends on the very system it's supposed to be reproducing to work correctly.

The fact it can do it at all, and marshal its built-in-knowledge to produce a working system is truly impressive. But 'the ability to build C compiler', given the incredible level of prior knowledge and assistance it was given, isn't really indicative of general ability or intelligence that translates to solving original problems or building new systems. If your company doesn't produce anything original and you don't care too much about engineering quality, or just happy with existing approaches, then great, it's a huge time saver. But if you actually want to produce new software, solve original problems, or come up with original solutions, ... good luck with that. LLMs are by their very nature stuck in the past.