Comment by FartyMcFarter
11 hours ago
> People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler.
This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.
If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.
As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.
I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.
This might grow bigger than cobol.
There will be a large number of companies that will be staffed entirely by vibe coders and when an issue crops up that cannot be debugged by them a consultancy will be brought it. The consultants will use their superior agentic skills supported with actual coding and software archeology experience.
Some other companies will have both vibe coders and systems engineers on staff.
I’m just making this up, it probably won’t be like that. But it’s interesting to think about it.