Comment by jurgenburgen
8 hours ago
The difference is that you don’t need to review the machine code produced by a compiler.
The same is not true for LLM output. I can’t tell my manager I don’t know how to fix something in production the agent wrote. The equivalent analogy would be if we had to know both the high-level language _and_ assembly.
I was an engineering manager for a commercial C/C++ toolchain used in embedded systems development. We, and our customers, examined the generated code continously. In our case, to figure out better optimizations (and fix bugs). For some of our customers, because their device had severe memory constraints or trying to do difficult performance optimizations.
Moving up to an MMU and running Linux was a different (more abstract) world. Although since it was embedded, low-level functions might still be in both assembly and C if not the apps on top.