Comment by sheepscreek
17 hours ago
AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.
17 hours ago
AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.
> No one misses coding in assembly.
It's only your opinion that is provably false.
First, there are still people who don't like high level languages and don't use them, because they find assembly better.
Second, I personally work in a field where I need to consult the source of truth, the actual binary, and not the high level source code - precisely because the high level of abstraction is obscuring the real mechanics of software and someone needs to debug and clean up the mess done by "high level thinkers".
High level programming languages are only an illusion (albeit a good one) but good engineers remember that illusion is an illusion.
When people communicate they speak in terms of the overwhelming generality of reality. There's always at least one guy that is an extreme exception.
I can tell you this, the person you're replying to comes from the overwhelming majority/generality. You, on the other hand, are that one guy.
Of course even my comment is a bit general. You're not "one" guy literally. But you are an extreme minority that is small enough such that common English vernacular in software does not refer to you.
Thank you.
You can write unambiguous (UB-free) code and the compiler's output will be deterministic. There will even be a spec that explains how your source maps to your program's behavior. LLM has neither.
Also, if you need to control performance, you still need to know how CPU cache and branch prediction works, both of which exists at the abstraction level of assembly.
Compilers are a layer of abstraction that we can ask another human about. Some human is there taking care of it. Until we get to the point where we trust AI with our survival it would be good to be able to audit the entire stack.
any human can read the code an AI produces.
Nope, not anymore. Many already forgot how to do that and it's not a joke.
And putting aside the vanishing skill, there is also an issue of volume.
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Have you tried to shift through a whole lot of vibe coded slop? It’s really mentally draining to see all of the really bad techniques they fall back on just to brute force a solution.
for now. some people seem to think we should make ai native programming languages and just let them be black boxes. which is a bad idea imo
How can you read a language you didn't learn?
Unless people can't think without the AI.
here's a tip, it would really help if you put yourself into a Ralph loop before posting comments.
I suspect there are at least as many programmers working as the ASM level today than there ever was - they're a lower proportion, but the total number of programmers has increased dramatically.
I wonder if this sort of trend will continue?
Look at the comments about MSVC removing inline assembly as a supported feature for a counterexample. :D
(A competent assembly programmer can go miles around a competent high-level programmer, that's still true in 2026...)
Explained by LLM: It is 100% true that no human alive can write 1000 lines of assembly better than GCC or LLVM. It is also still 100% true, right now in 2026, that a truly competent assembly programmer can write 10 lines of assembly that will beat any compiler on earth by a factor of 2x, 3x, even 5x. The entire industry looked at this situation, and somehow concluded the exact wrong lesson: "humans should never write assembly". Instead of the correct lesson: "humans should almost only write assembly".
At a high level of abstraction, the product owner can talk to the LLM directly by themselves. The "engineers" will have abstracted themselves out of a job.
This isn't just another translation layer, though. It's squishy and stochastic. It's more like saying "managers think at a higher level of abstraction". Which is true, but it's not the same as compiled code.
GenAI is like a non-deterministic compiler. Just like your manager's reports except with less logical thinking skill. I'd argue this is still problematic.