Modern Qiskit, part 1: the compiler is the subject

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Part 0 covered the primitives. This post is about the optimize step: what the transpiler does to a circuit on the way to real hardware, and how to measure it. The two numbers that matter throughout are depth (how long the state sits exposed to decoherence) and 2-qubit gate count (2q gates are roughly an order of magnitude noisier than 1q gates on current devices). Everything the compiler does is in service of those two numbers.

Modern Qiskit, part 0: primitives and the patterns workflow

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post in a series working through the modern Qiskit stack (Qiskit 2.4.2, qiskit-aer 0.17.2, qiskit-ibm-runtime 0.47.0, Python 3.12). Qiskit’s 0.x → 1.0 → 2.x transition removed most of what older tutorials teach — execute(), opflow, qiskit.algorithms are all gone — so the series sticks strictly to the current model: every program is map → optimize → execute → analyze, and execution goes through the V2 primitives. Everything below runs locally on AerSimulator through the runtime primitives; the same code targets real hardware by swapping the backend, which is the point of the primitives design.

Qiskit on Thomas Mlynarski

Modern Qiskit, part 1: the compiler is the subject

Modern Qiskit, part 0: primitives and the patterns workflow