If you don’t understand how to do programming at this level you’re not going to get far with an LLM. They tend to fall down on anything larger than a greenfield

If you don’t understand how to do programming at this level you’re not going to get far with an LLM. They tend to fall down on anything larger than a greenfield todo app. You can easily write slow code in C and Rust. Get enough branch mispredictions and cache misses and it won’t matter that your program is written in a low level language. Guiding profilers to optimize workloads takes more context than source code alone has. You’ll still need to know how memory is architected and how many cycles instructions take on the platform you’re targeting. And you’ll have to guide the LLM to it. It might be easier and faster to do it yourself. An LLM can generate the kind of code that has no obvious errors in it. It’s trained on the sloppy code that unreasonable deadlines and hubris produce. Humans are notoriously bad at detecting undefined behaviour, safety, and temporal errors in single programs let alone whole systems. How is an untrained developer who hasn’t been contending with systems programming for the last twenty years supposed to review and verify this code? You’ll need to get fast at verifying large amounts of code quickly or else pray that the LLM isn’t generating the kinds of exploitable memory bugs that lead to funny machines and RCEs. We already have enough of this code as it is and most teams are trying to be conservative with their tech debt. I have no doubt that some amount of code will be generated by LLMs in these sorts of languages and systems. Even after the bubble pops and the feudal lords lose their ability to extract rents. But I think most people using them will be more tactical and careful in their approach. At least I hope so. There are still many good reasons to use a high level language. And if folks want to break into systems programming that’s great! But you have to learn systems programming in order to use an LLM effectively, in my experience. There’s no shortcut.