Comment by beej71
21 hours ago
> Just like if you pressed a button to wipe out our main language stack at our job, yeah none of us would know how to do anything with assembly or machine code.
All the devs would spend a couple weeks learning assembly and go on coding. And all the non-dev vibe coders would be unable to continue.
So I don't think it's quite the same.
Yeah but then it goes the same way with LLMs? Just spend a few weeks delving the stack and then you go on coding. Learning a codebase of enterprise-scale compiler-generated assembly sounds like a much bigger nightmare than fixing up ai generated code.
*Many* devs would be completely incapable of learning assembly. Heck, many would be unable to learn C.
Likewise, *many* vibecoders would absolutely fail to adapt, and some would adapt, with this being their first experience. Just think of how many people started coding by using old gamemaker tools or scratch, or playing silly games. It is not the same as an LLM, but the idea that it is a gateway is definitely there. I wouldn't call LLMs "programming", because they're doing more: they're building products, which involves a lot more than programming -- hence why the skills to really thrive with LLMs are not just those of a good developer or engineer.
But weeks? I'd say less than 10% of the devs I've known my entire life would develop properly in assembly (and I'm being quite generous). Memory management, pointers, registers...just to name a few.
I think far too many people fail to realize that, with LLMs, the brain of a good problem solver, especially one with engineering background, gets much better results than someone with different characteristics. Similarly, the mind of a good product developer (and even someone with good UX inclination) does a much better job and building usable products.
This idea that LLMs are doing all of the work is frankly mind-boggling to me. It must stem from vastly different experiences of what LLMs do or whomever is using them around who says these claims. Obviously they do a lot of work, especially in the development prototyping, architecture and even ideation parts. But they only do (almost) "all of the work" in very simple or bad apps.
I've seen loads of terrible vibe-coding jobs: UX is terrible, bugs everywhere, clearly no consideration at any point for architecture (and thus the product is barely holding on). And I've seen the opposite: products that feel and act like premium stuff, because they were built by people with true love for what they do, sometimes even with a very good problem solving mind to add to that (leading to a not-so-terrible-albeit-still-barely-holding-on-but-thats-clearly-good-enough-for-the-product architecture). For every good app there are maybe 100 lovable apps that all look the same and break the second you do the wrong sequence of clicks, but the good ones do exist.
It's a tool that enables mediocrity to exist where it didn't previously, but it also empowers so many people in incredible ways. Still, you definitely need to be good at using the tool, and it definitely doesn't just happen overnight.
Isn't OS still required for a CS degree? Didn’t we all write our own kernel and virtual memory system in MIPs assembly code? We’ve been here before, I’m sure a lot of future AI coders will be forced to learn the abstraction stack like we did in a formal CS program.
As the field of "computing" develops more and more high level abstractions, that necessarily reduces the amount of time that can be spend on lower-level stuff. These days I think it's typical to have one or two courses that cover OS/embedded/assembly/compiler type of topics, but that's the bare minimum for awareness, not near enough for actual learning. On the spectrum from low-level to high-level, CS sits just below SE. Computer engineering is the field/degree that gives people actual skills in OS-level programming.
The courses might have assembly and stuff on paper (in many places not even that) but in most cases you write very simple toy programs, nothing like real-world stuff, reading compiler output or writing larger asm programs.
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No.
I've seen "software engineering" degrees where they teach some high level coding and how to manage tickets and this sort of stuff.
0 mathematics, 0 algorithms, 0 formal languages.
Universities are pumping out "professionals" like crazy, plus nowadays they are replacing courses with new courses about AI (which might be machine learning in the best case or just prompting in the worst case).
The result is that you need to go and ask what courses where in a degree, and even then it's not really a guarantee of anything (I've met master student with bachelor in computer science who were completely unable to find the smallest number in an array).
Yeah, it was, 15 years ago when I was in school.
And yet: I have not written assembly since school except for one Advent of Code challenge, and I expect it would take me quite a while to pick up a productive level of facility with it.
Well, I'm only a few years from retirement, so maybe the demographics are different now, I grant. Used to be everyone learned assembly in college.
I learned MIPS assembly and there were brief references to x86 assembly, and I know most of my friends would do fine with assembly, but, alas, most engineers I've known barely even know what memory management is, so being able to create proper abstractions with assembly would definitely be out of their league.
It's vaguely similar to how JS and Node enable so many people to flood the market without really knowing the underlying technology. Many of those would definitely not pick up assembly (which is the entire point I was trying to make)
Hell, I did a Physics degree, and I had to learn assembly (the NS 32k), which wasn't a huge issue alongside the 6502, Z80 and m68k that I already knew.
Now retired (come join the dark side, we have cookies) but still a few years away from what people would call "retirement age"
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I think some still do. But writing a few lines of code in some computer architecture course isn't really enough. It's not just the language, it's the libraries and not understanding how things work under the hood.
I remember back in 2014 we had a class in assembly (we used x86 assembly running in DOSbox). One of the projects I most vividly remember was writing a simple paint program controlled using the arrow keys.
by the 90's more like struggle through a single, one-semester course that had a unit and some labs on assembly.
That was 40 years ago when we had 5.25" discs in school. In todays schools (up to 16-18), nobody knows what Assembly is, even the teachers.
Used to be everyone learned assembly in college.
I imagine that was x86, which was relatively easy but also horrible. Very few people are writing assembly today because you'd need to be able to do x86-64 SIMD, ARM64, and maybe RISC-V, which are all quite a bit more complicated.
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To add to what you're saying, that's also ignoring that having the time or ability to build really complex things in assembly is harder, higher level languages making things easier also enables people to do more complex things
> All the devs would spend a couple weeks learning assembly and go on coding
A couple weeks?! Really slacking, why not a few hours?
Add the violin and calculus while they're at it.
Assembly is simple. You can learn it quickly. It’s writing a large program in it that’s hard. How roller coaster tycoon was written in it boggles my mind.
But that’s the whole problem. Almost no one has experience programming in the large with assembly. It’s far more difficult than building the simple toys built even in good university programs. It would be a total shit show and probably upwards of 80% would quit or crash out.
but even the smallest modern programs would be monsters in Assembly, so it's simplicity doesn't help much, and you're juggling a lot more than 3 bean bags.
The notion that the average developer would recover from the removal of modern high level language abstractions and frameworks, learn assembly, and go back to their regular coding velocity is patently absurd.
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