4 ms·

AI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.

orblivion 6mo ago
Compilers are a layer of abstraction that we can ask another human about. Some human is there taking care of it. Until we get to the point where we trust AI with our survival it would be good to be able to audit the entire stack.
- andsoitis 6mo ago
  any human can read the code an AI produces.
  - hun3 6mo ago
    How can you read a language you didn't learn?
  - kirth_gersen 6mo ago
    for now. some people seem to think we should make ai native programming languages and just let them be black boxes. which is a bad idea imo
  - dawnerd 6mo ago
    Have you tried to shift through a whole lot of vibe coded slop? It’s really mentally draining to see all of the really bad techniques they fall back on just to brute force a solution.
  - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
    Nope, not anymore. Many already forgot how to do that and it's not a joke. And putting aside the vanishing skill, there is also an issue of volume.
    - cyberpunk 6mo ago
      So... Our jobs are safe then? I mean, assuming we don't also atrophy to the same extent as the 'many'?
      - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
        I'm just saying that I already see that people are outsourcing all the thinking to the models - not only code generation and reviews, but even design - the part that "senior engineers" without imagination think only they are capable of doing. It's worrying how much trust is being put in those systems. And my worry is not about the job anymore, but our future in general.
        cyberpunk 6mo ago
        It's a bit of a weird place to be in as a senior engineer who has spent 2 decades perfecting his craft. So, on one hand, I'm also kinda sad and how quickly we've thrown the guardrails away, but on the other -- it's... Well. It's just work. Turns out, no one ever really cared how elegant or robust our code was and how clever we were to think up some design or other, or that we had an eye on the future; just that it worked well enough to enable X business process / sale / whatever. And now we're basically commoditised, even if the quality isn't great, more people can solve these problems. So, being honest, I think a lot of my pushback is just a kinda internal rebellion against admitting that actually, we're not all that special after all. I'm just glad I got to spend 20 years doing my hobby professionally, got paid really well for it, and often times was forced to solve complicated problems no one else could -- that kept me from boredom. I think the shift we are seeing now, as 'previously' knowledge workers is that work becomes a lot more like manual labour than what we've really been doing up until now. When there's no 'I don't know' anymore, then you're not really doing knowledge work, right? I guess I'll just ride the wave, spew out LLM crap at work, and save the craft for some personal projects, I'll certainly have the capacity now work is a no-op.
        cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
        Yeah, but the thing is, it's not "just work". Software now has really big impact on the world and actual lives. In a corporate world, we are typically detached from real world consequences and looking at people around me, people really don't think about such things - but I do. And I really care, because "relaxed" standards might result in errors that amount to stuff like identity thefts, or stolen money, shit like this, even on the smallest scale. Obviously we can't prevent everything, but it seems like we, as industry, decided to collectively YOLO and stop giving shit at all. And personally I don't like that it is me who is losing sleep over this, while people who happily delegate all their thinking over to LLMs sleep better than ever now.
  - orblivion 6mo ago
    Unless people can't think without the AI.
  - ares623 6mo ago
    here's a tip, it would really help if you put yourself into a Ralph loop before posting comments.
cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
> No one misses coding in assembly. It's only your opinion that is provably false. First, there are still people who don't like high level languages and don't use them, because they find assembly better. Second, I personally work in a field where I need to consult the source of truth, the actual binary, and not the high level source code - precisely because the high level of abstraction is obscuring the real mechanics of software and someone needs to debug and clean up the mess done by "high level thinkers". High level programming languages are only an illusion (albeit a good one) but good engineers remember that illusion is an illusion.
- threethirtytwo 6mo ago
  When people communicate they speak in terms of the overwhelming generality of reality. There's always at least one guy that is an extreme exception. I can tell you this, the person you're replying to comes from the overwhelming majority/generality. You, on the other hand, are that one guy. Of course even my comment is a bit general. You're not "one" guy literally. But you are an extreme minority that is small enough such that common English vernacular in software does not refer to you.
  - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
    Thank you.
    - threethirtytwo 6mo ago
      Not a compliment. I’m saying you’re speaking from an incredibly obscure perspective because you took what the other person said way to literally and pedantically.
      - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
        Your intent here is irrelevant. ;) I know why my perspective is the correct one here and the fact that is "incredibly obscure" only supports my findings. Majority of software sucks and majority of "software engineers" suck too. It's not a herd that one should ever want to be associated with.
hun3 6mo ago
You can write unambiguous (UB-free) code and the compiler's output will be deterministic. There will even be a spec that explains how your source maps to your program's behavior. LLM has neither. Also, if you need to control performance, you still need to know how CPU cache and branch prediction works, both of which exists at the abstraction level of assembly.
kimixa 6mo ago
I suspect there are at least as many programmers working as the ASM level today than there ever was - they're a lower proportion, but the total number of programmers has increased dramatically. I wonder if this sort of trend will continue?
Pannoniae 6mo ago
Look at the comments about MSVC removing inline assembly as a supported feature for a counterexample. :D (A competent assembly programmer can go miles around a competent high-level programmer, that's still true in 2026...)
- eleumik 6mo ago
  Explained by LLM: It is 100% true that no human alive can write 1000 lines of assembly better than GCC or LLVM. It is also still 100% true, right now in 2026, that a truly competent assembly programmer can write 10 lines of assembly that will beat any compiler on earth by a factor of 2x, 3x, even 5x. The entire industry looked at this situation, and somehow concluded the exact wrong lesson: "humans should never write assembly". Instead of the correct lesson: "humans should almost only write assembly".
ThrowawayR2 6mo ago
At a high level of abstraction, the product owner can talk to the LLM directly by themselves. The "engineers" will have abstracted themselves out of a job.
beej71 6mo ago
This isn't just another translation layer, though. It's squishy and stochastic. It's more like saying "managers think at a higher level of abstraction". Which is true, but it's not the same as compiled code. GenAI is like a non-deterministic compiler. Just like your manager's reports except with less logical thinking skill. I'd argue this is still problematic.
traderj0e 6mo ago
The comparison to compilers doesn't make sense. When your job is to build software at work, you don't throw away the code after and commit a binary. But more importantly, an LLM is not a compiler.

orblivion 6mo ago

Compilers are a layer of abstraction that we can ask another human about. Some human is there taking care of it. Until we get to the point where we trust AI with our survival it would be good to be able to audit the entire stack.

andsoitis 6mo ago
any human can read the code an AI produces.
- hun3 6mo ago
  How can you read a language you didn't learn?
- kirth_gersen 6mo ago
  for now. some people seem to think we should make ai native programming languages and just let them be black boxes. which is a bad idea imo
- dawnerd 6mo ago
  Have you tried to shift through a whole lot of vibe coded slop? It’s really mentally draining to see all of the really bad techniques they fall back on just to brute force a solution.
- cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
  Nope, not anymore. Many already forgot how to do that and it's not a joke. And putting aside the vanishing skill, there is also an issue of volume.
  - cyberpunk 6mo ago
    So... Our jobs are safe then? I mean, assuming we don't also atrophy to the same extent as the 'many'?
    - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
      I'm just saying that I already see that people are outsourcing all the thinking to the models - not only code generation and reviews, but even design - the part that "senior engineers" without imagination think only they are capable of doing. It's worrying how much trust is being put in those systems. And my worry is not about the job anymore, but our future in general.
      - cyberpunk 6mo ago
        It's a bit of a weird place to be in as a senior engineer who has spent 2 decades perfecting his craft. So, on one hand, I'm also kinda sad and how quickly we've thrown the guardrails away, but on the other -- it's... Well. It's just work. Turns out, no one ever really cared how elegant or robust our code was and how clever we were to think up some design or other, or that we had an eye on the future; just that it worked well enough to enable X business process / sale / whatever. And now we're basically commoditised, even if the quality isn't great, more people can solve these problems. So, being honest, I think a lot of my pushback is just a kinda internal rebellion against admitting that actually, we're not all that special after all. I'm just glad I got to spend 20 years doing my hobby professionally, got paid really well for it, and often times was forced to solve complicated problems no one else could -- that kept me from boredom. I think the shift we are seeing now, as 'previously' knowledge workers is that work becomes a lot more like manual labour than what we've really been doing up until now. When there's no 'I don't know' anymore, then you're not really doing knowledge work, right? I guess I'll just ride the wave, spew out LLM crap at work, and save the craft for some personal projects, I'll certainly have the capacity now work is a no-op.
        cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
        Yeah, but the thing is, it's not "just work". Software now has really big impact on the world and actual lives. In a corporate world, we are typically detached from real world consequences and looking at people around me, people really don't think about such things - but I do. And I really care, because "relaxed" standards might result in errors that amount to stuff like identity thefts, or stolen money, shit like this, even on the smallest scale. Obviously we can't prevent everything, but it seems like we, as industry, decided to collectively YOLO and stop giving shit at all. And personally I don't like that it is me who is losing sleep over this, while people who happily delegate all their thinking over to LLMs sleep better than ever now.
- orblivion 6mo ago
  Unless people can't think without the AI.
- ares623 6mo ago
  here's a tip, it would really help if you put yourself into a Ralph loop before posting comments.

cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago

> No one misses coding in assembly. It's only your opinion that is provably false. First, there are still people who don't like high level languages and don't use them, because they find assembly better. Second, I personally work in a field where I need to consult the source of truth, the actual binary, and not the high level source code - precisely because the high level of abstraction is obscuring the real mechanics of software and someone needs to debug and clean up the mess done by "high level thinkers". High level programming languages are only an illusion (albeit a good one) but good engineers remember that illusion is an illusion.

threethirtytwo 6mo ago
When people communicate they speak in terms of the overwhelming generality of reality. There's always at least one guy that is an extreme exception. I can tell you this, the person you're replying to comes from the overwhelming majority/generality. You, on the other hand, are that one guy. Of course even my comment is a bit general. You're not "one" guy literally. But you are an extreme minority that is small enough such that common English vernacular in software does not refer to you.
- cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
  Thank you.
  - threethirtytwo 6mo ago
    Not a compliment. I’m saying you’re speaking from an incredibly obscure perspective because you took what the other person said way to literally and pedantically.
    - cyclopeanutopia 6mo ago
      Your intent here is irrelevant. ;) I know why my perspective is the correct one here and the fact that is "incredibly obscure" only supports my findings. Majority of software sucks and majority of "software engineers" suck too. It's not a herd that one should ever want to be associated with.

hun3 6mo ago

You can write unambiguous (UB-free) code and the compiler's output will be deterministic. There will even be a spec that explains how your source maps to your program's behavior. LLM has neither. Also, if you need to control performance, you still need to know how CPU cache and branch prediction works, both of which exists at the abstraction level of assembly.

kimixa 6mo ago

I suspect there are at least as many programmers working as the ASM level today than there ever was - they're a lower proportion, but the total number of programmers has increased dramatically. I wonder if this sort of trend will continue?

Pannoniae 6mo ago

Look at the comments about MSVC removing inline assembly as a supported feature for a counterexample. :D (A competent assembly programmer can go miles around a competent high-level programmer, that's still true in 2026...)

eleumik 6mo ago
Explained by LLM: It is 100% true that no human alive can write 1000 lines of assembly better than GCC or LLVM. It is also still 100% true, right now in 2026, that a truly competent assembly programmer can write 10 lines of assembly that will beat any compiler on earth by a factor of 2x, 3x, even 5x. The entire industry looked at this situation, and somehow concluded the exact wrong lesson: "humans should never write assembly". Instead of the correct lesson: "humans should almost only write assembly".

ThrowawayR2 6mo ago

At a high level of abstraction, the product owner can talk to the LLM directly by themselves. The "engineers" will have abstracted themselves out of a job.

beej71 6mo ago

This isn't just another translation layer, though. It's squishy and stochastic. It's more like saying "managers think at a higher level of abstraction". Which is true, but it's not the same as compiled code. GenAI is like a non-deterministic compiler. Just like your manager's reports except with less logical thinking skill. I'd argue this is still problematic.

traderj0e 6mo ago

The comparison to compilers doesn't make sense. When your job is to build software at work, you don't throw away the code after and commit a binary. But more importantly, an LLM is not a compiler.