Comment by bitwize
1 year ago
Back in the day, if you went to a website you could always tell who wrote their HTML by hand and who used a tool like GruntPage, Dreamweaver, etc. even without looking at the META tags. The by-hand stuff was like a polished jewel that had only as much layout, styling, and markup as needed to get the desired effect. The proprietary web editor stuff was encrusted with extraneous tags and vendor-specific extensions (like mso: attributes and styles in GruntPage).
Then as now, if you let the machine do the thinking for you, the result was a steaming mess. Up to you if that was accessible (and for many, it was).
You can make the same claim about compiled code vs hand written assembly, and yet the vast majority of software is compiled or interpreted.
A compiler is written by very smart humans to a spec written by humans, also probably smart but I don’t know enough to claim that bit.
An LLM is just displaying the next statistical token.
Completely different.
Or, as I like to put it, pulling out the next refrigerator poetry tile from a stochastic bag of holding.
In the past, hand-crafted assembly code was common because it was easy to beat the compiler. This is still true today in some niches.