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To be honest lots of developers think they don’t need to learn machine code. They just need to learn a language which once compiled will produce machine code.
by cm2187 4mo ago
To be honest lots of developers think they don’t need to learn machine code. They just need to learn a language which once compiled will produce machine code.
- themafia 4mo agoDevelopers can change their minds.
- Sharlin 4mo agoCompilers are deterministic and, luckily, not agentic. But yes, it's not obvious (or perhaps even likely) that it just happens that current high-level languages are the "correct" optimal level of abstraction at which you can ignore the sausage-making details at the lower levels. Ultimately, of course, it depends on the use case. Something like Python is so far removed from machine instructions that knowing assembly hardly gives the programmer any additional value. (Also, obligatory reminder that assembly and even numeric machine code are also abstractions, an "API" provided by the CPU. Instructions get split or fused into micro-ops, named registers are a backwards-compatible abstraction over a much larger register file, instructions get reordered and executed in parallel depending on their data dependencies, a large fraction of the total transistor budget is spent on multi-level caches and cache logic to maintain the illusion of fast access to a single, uniform memory space...)
- premiumLootBox 4mo ago[dead]
- tovej 4mo agoThis is different. Understanding assembly/machine code is optional but helpful. The programming language semantics are enough to reason about what the program is doing. Other tools also help, but are optional for learning how to program. Using an AI, there is no semantic model that can be used to reason through. You're left without any mental model of the proglblem at all.
- jnovek 4mo agoLLMs these days seem to have no problem using language semantics to conceptualize what’s happening in a program. This is my favorite use of an LLM, “why is this library doing x” and then it digs through the library itself in my venv to find an answer.
- tovej 4mo agoThat's not what the LLM is doing. It is guessing at what is happening by regurgitating some docs. It's a more expensive web search. You also don't have a mental model if you need to ask the LLM about it. This is stuff you should be internalizing.
- jnovek 4mo agoYou internalize the inner workings of all the libraries in your venv? Impressive! My current project’s uv.lock has ~60 packages in it already, reading and comprehending those tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code must be time consuming. You’re also just confidently wrong about the model reading the code. It quotes file paths and line numbers and I open and read those files at those line numbers. For me, hallucinations are much more frequent when it references the docs rather than code because docs are more subjective than code. This is a normal thing I’ve been doing since at least December. I have to ask — do you actually use LLM coding tools? Your knowledge on this topic seems really out-of-date.
- tovej 4mo agoThe fundamental architecture of LLMs has not changed, so knowledge on that cannot be out of date. Do I internalize the inner workings of all the libraries? Not unless it's necessary. Sometimes it is. If I want to read the source code of the function I'm calling, I can just do that, my IDE pulls up the file with one key combination. I'm perfectly capable of reading source code myself, I don't need a non-deterministic filter in between.
- rmunn 4mo agoWhat I've done is ask the LLM a question like "How do I configure EF Core in this particular way?", then when it tells me the answer, I go and look up that function in the EF Core docs and learn by reading the docs. (Which also tells me whether it's correct or hallucinating; one time the LLM told me "You can do X like this" and the documentation said "We don't yet support doing X, but in a future version you'll be able to do it like this"). Here, I'm using the LLM to compensate for the fact that MSDN search is awful and the bits of info you need are scattered across three different articles, none of which link directly to each other.
- lucianbr 4mo agoI wonder if a probabilistic compiler would be fine for the people arguing this. One that sometimes produces machine code that does something else, and sometimes produces machine code that is just broken and does nothing useful. From the same source code. What if your compiler could be fooled by some other developers into spending thousands of dollars, and still not produce the desired machine code in the end?