CAKE Paper: Evolving Compiler Harness via AI for SOTA Kernels
lazowska · x · 2026-08-17
Discussion on the future of AI codegen: allowing models to evolve their compiler harness, creating and evolving tools and abstractions for best performance via experimentation. The CAKE work demonstrates this beautifully, producing State-of-the-Art kernels with practical impact.
Core Concepts:
- The compiler is not a fixed black box the agent calls — it's part of the harness, and it's under evolution too.
- CAKE didn't inherit existing abstraction layers (e.g., tile/layout). The vocabulary was distilled by agents from a corpus of production kernels.
- Evolution Mechanism:
- Every pattern the agent couldn't express pushed new primitives into the IR.
- Analyses were implemented to keep them checkable.
- Every recurring barrier/layout bug became a verifier rule.
- None of this can be designed up front. The IR has to co-evolve with the kernels; the workload tells you what is missing, and the corpus tells you if a fix broke anything.
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