3 ms·

They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job

• deadbabe 3mo ago
  What's there to advance to? Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.
  • devin 3mo ago
    If you think we're "done", you have no imagination.
    • deadbabe 3mo ago
      What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app? We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new. It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.
      • whattheheckheck 3mo ago
        Why did we even need bridges in the first place
      • LPisGood 3mo ago
        When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he could not have predicted the teleprompter. Now that code is easy to generate, it’s plausible that we will use much, much more of it than before. It’s also a bit ironic to imagine that we’re at the end of new software ideas on a site owned(?) by YC.
        • deadbabe 3mo ago
          it's also plausible that with an ability to generate as much code as we want with little effort, we will quickly discover how much code we actually need, and then plateau at that point. Personally, I think we've already reached that point. Even at YC, I have not really seen any startup doing anything interesting where their main value prop is enabled by new proprietary code that does stuff no one else can already do.
          • walt_grata 3mo ago
            We have more code than we need. Proof for me is every "smart" device that worked better before we put a computer in it.
            • deadbabe 3mo ago
              Exactly, this is the true problem with the world today: too much code.
        • dsego 3mo ago
          Are teleprompters a net positive achievement? They were needed for live television, they will be superseded I guess by AI generated news avatars. And 24-hour news coverage is in the business of generating content non-stop, to sell advertisements, regardless if there are newsworthy events or not, the machine never stops producing.
      • erikschoster 3mo ago
        > There’s nothing new left to discover. It's the end of history. What could we possibly discover about a series of technologies that are already nearly 100 years old now? I've heard people say that various things are "solved" now because of LLMs too -- programming included. This implies we've "solved" thinking. I'm worried about these sentiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history
      • galaxyLogic 3mo ago
        Mature tech evolves more slowly. Think about cars, there's nothing new about them any more. But wait, what about electic cars? Aren't they a new thing? And driverless cars. And soon flying taxis. Automobiles are an old invention but they are still evolving.
        • aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
          The reason the evolution of cars has slowed down so much is mostly regulatory compliance. With the current ongoing revolution in home manufacturing (starting with 3D printing; currently there is a lot of work done in home CNC machining), it would be easily possible to get a huge leap towards "print your own car". The reason why you see nothing of this is basically red tape.
      • kbelder 3mo ago
        Well, a short time ago somebody made the first LLM. Was that the end of it?
  • nektro 3mo ago
    that you don't see this as inevitable worries me dearly
  • ryandvm 3mo ago
    This gives "let's close the patent office"
    • aleph_minus_one 3mo ago
      > This gives "let's close the patent office" This is a really good idea for completely different reasons. :-)
  • asdff 3mo ago
    This is probably true in the consumer facing software space. But in business, industry, and academia, often there are novel data generated by some new or refined process. And this needs new software that correctly handles both the nature of these new data and meet the goals the data is collected to advance. This sort of software is also usually poorly represented in training sets, if represented at all.
  • bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
    this implies that the only thing that can change what needs doing are technology platforms, which about 6000 years of human civilization would indicate is not the case.
• lp4v4n 3mo ago
  >They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm disputing this. You can have a training corpus in assembly as big as any other language: just feed the compiled result(in assembly) of the CRUD apps to the LLMs.
• cactusplant7374 3mo ago
  It's still possible to make CRUD apps in assembly with an AI agent but it would be a research project.
  • Zambyte 3mo ago
    By "research project" you you mean by people who understand assembly? Because then we're back to where we started.
    • cactusplant7374 3mo ago
      I mean for the agent. They are good enough to conduct research now.
• dehrmann 3mo ago
  > They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I suspect that despite its translation abilities, this is true, but I'd like to see it do things in languages that are more or less appropriate for tasks to see how much the training corpus matters vs. its ability to translate. Assembly is a bit of an extreme example because you're either writing it as close to C as possible (C is essentially portable assembly) or you're writing complex, unreviewable code that happens to work. And who know if it's been trained on register allocation, or resorts to doing everything on the stack because it works.
  • LtWorf 3mo ago
    > C is essentially portable assembly Not really, assembly shows you what the machine instructions actually are. In C you have loops, functions structs. All things that make no sense in assembly.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • gnabgib 3mo ago
      Loops (conditional JMPS - JE/JNE/JZ/JNZ/JB/JNB.. and a dozen others) and functions (CALL, RET) exist in assembly. Goto is there too (all JMPs). C makes assembly sense.
      • fragmede 3mo ago
        Oh that's an interesting thought. Goto's are considered harmful, because holy hell as a human trying to understand and reason about code, the spaghettifcation if someone else used gotos all over the place and I have to reconstruct their thought process just doesn't sound like fun. But if we're no longer writing code by hand (which, I gotta be honest, I'm using AI to write a lot of code for me these days), then does that still matter? If a human isn't going to have to understand the code, can we get more performance out of existing systems by considering goto's useful?
• ekidd 3mo ago
  Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wat https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it; I believe essentially all the assembly worked correctly on the first try. I have feelings about this, but I'm not pretending it isn't real.
  • dude250711 3mo ago
    The guys with unlimited Fable/Mythos access are for some reason incapable of producing a flawless Claude Code app built entirely in native assemblies.
    • bflesch 3mo ago
      They're so busy winning that they don't care about improving their own web apps ;)
    • byzantinegene 3mo ago
      they use React to render their TUI :)
    • cpursley 3mo ago
      You’re getting down voted, but it would really be nice if they rebuilt the thing in Rust or something like that. I’m just tired of these enormous JavaScript bundles pretending to be desktop apps. Especially when we need to squeeze as much juice as possible out of our machines.
  • viccis 3mo ago
    Yeah I had it remake my favorite TI-89 graphing calculator game in Python and it one shotted it perfectly.
  • avador 3mo ago
    There’s a very real dichotomy at play here. Position 0: humans depend upon AI. Position 1: AIs depend upon humans. At first blush, it seems achingly obvious that position 1 is true, whilst position 0 is a false play by con artists. Well, at first blush I agree! But first blushes are notorious for being famous last words (blushes). You see, we always knew that the tool shapes the hand. That is, as we use computational (discrete) devices, we ourselves become more computational, discrete. But what we did not anticipate is that the tool would fool others as the ACTUAL HAND. I am so fooled. Daily. My friends. Does technique encompass being? Answer me this!
• Salgat 3mo ago
  LLMs are perfectly capable of translating between programming languages at this point. The main bottleneck for them is logic, not language.
  • galaxyLogic 3mo ago
    And the amount of logic needed to understand code, including how to fix it or modify it further depends on how complicated the code-structure is. I wonder about this: Does LLM write better code in a better language? Humans often have more difficulty fixing existing code than reqriting it from scratch, and un-structured un-constrained code would be a big reason for that. But maybe it doesn't apply to an LLM if it always rewrites all code from scratch?
    • t43562 3mo ago
      > I wonder about this: Does LLM write better code in a better language? The whole point is to rewrite everything in a language you don't understand and then ignore whether it's better because you can't tell. That language, of course, must be Rust.
• coderatlarge 3mo ago
  couldn’t the frontier labs simply compile their existing source code training data and have an assembly corpus to train on?
• wqaatwt 3mo ago
  LLMs are designed to imitate humans not compilers. Hardly anyone is capable of writing modern optimized Assembly code by hand outside of a few snippets here and there (not in a reasonable amount of time at least)