Comment by vidarh

> A good analogy here is programming in assembler. Manually crafting programs at the machine code level was very common when I got my first computer in the 1980s. Especially for games. By the late 90s that had mostly disappeared.

Indeed, a lot of us looked with suspicion and disdain at people that used those primitive compilers that generated awful, slow code. I once spent ages hand-optimizing a component that had been written in C, and took great pleasure in the fact I could delete about every other line of disassembly...

When I wrote my first compiler a couple of years later, it was in assembler at first, and supported inline assembler so I could gradually convert to bootstrap it that way.

Because I couldn't imagine writing it in C, given the awful code the C compilers I had available generated (and how slow they were)...

These days most programmers don't know assembler, and increasingly don't know languaes as low level as C either.

And the world didn't fall apart.

People will complain that it is necessary for them to know the languages that will slowly be eaten away by LLMs, just like my generation argued it was absolutely necessary to know assembler if you wanted to be able to develop anything of substance.

I agree with you people should understand how things work, though, even if they don't know it well enough to build it from scratch.