There may be some specific parts of assembly generation where compilers are still outperformed by men, just as there are still specific parts of chess where men

There may be some specific parts of assembly generation where compilers are still outperformed by men, just as there are still specific parts of chess where men still outperform machines, but overall machines beat human programmers. The argument of allowing a human programmer to spend vastly more time is hardly fair, one could also probably write a hyper-optimizing compiler that takes far longer to compile to level the playing field, and that compiler will still triumph over men in how optimized the end result is. The only real advantage overal to human programmers here is the flexibility. A man can easily be told “spend four months on optimizing this”, a machine would have to be substantially rewritten to fully take advantage of being given extra time.