Comment by DanielHB

Since compilers became a thing Assembly language knowledge atrophied[1] across the workforce.

Since automatic memory management became a thing memory management and pointers knowledge atrophied[1] across the workforce (although not nearly to the same degree).

I think the pattern here is that compilers almost always output better machine code than humans, automatic memory management doesn't output better machine code than skilled humans can very (especially with modern languages that give you a lot build-time safety checks).

And even then, there is still demand for assembly knowledge in the workforce, it is just very niche.

I don't think LLMs will ever be good enough to "almost always" output better code than humans. But, like automatic memory management, it will likely make some types of programming more niche.

The key thing here is that compilers are deterministic, deterministic tools have way less variance in output quality. Automatic memory management is not as deterministic as a compiler because it happens at runtime. LLMs output build-time code, but the can be drastically different if I sneeze too hard.

[1]: as in % of the workforce, not absolute numbers. Hard to get exact figures on this, but I think we have more experienced people actively using Assembly today than we had before compilers became the default (late 80s). We probably have more active C/C++ programmers today than before Java became popular (early 2000s).