Compilers are systems that tame complexity in the "grug-brain" sense. They're true extensions of our senses and the information they offer should be provably co

Compilers are systems that tame complexity in the "grug-brain" sense. They're true extensions of our senses and the information they offer should be provably correct. The basic nature of my job is to maintain the tallest tower of complexity I can without it falling over, so I need to take complexity and find ways to confine it to places where I have some way of knowing that it can't hurt me. LLMs just don't do that. A leaky abstraction is just a layer of indirection, while a true abstraction (like a properly implemented high-level language) is among the most valuable things in CS. Programming is theory-building!