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0 pointsQuantumNomad_2mo ago0 comments

> if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things

I’ve been reminded lately of a conversation I had with a guy at hacker space cafe around ten years ago in Berlin.

He had been working as a programmer for a significantly longer time than me. Long enough that for many years of his career, he had been programming in assembly.

He was lamenting that these days, software was written in higher level languages, and that more and more programmers no longer had the same level of knowledge about the lower level workings of computers. He had a valid point and I enjoyed talking to him.

I think about this now when I think about agentic coding. Perhaps over time most software development will be done without the knowledge of the higher level programming languages that we know today. There will still be people around that work in the higher level programming languages in the future, and are intimately familiar with the higher level languages just like today there are still people who work in assembly even if the percentage of people has gotten lower over time relative to those that don’t.

And just like there are areas where assembly is still required knowledge, I think there will be areas where knowledge of the programming languages we use today will remain necessary and vibe coding alone wont cut it. But the percentage of people working in high level languages will go down, relative to the number of people vibe coding and never even looking at the code that the LLM is writing.

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8 comments · 4 top-level

sd92mo ago· 2 in thread

Lovely story, thanks for sharing.

I wonder how many assembly programmers got over it and retrained, versus moved on to do something totally different.

I find the agentic way of working simultaneously more exhausting and less stimulating. I don’t know if that’s something I’m going to get over, or whether this is the end of the line for me.

AnimalMuppet2mo ago

I wasn't there at the time, but I believe that most assembly programmers learned higher-level languages.

My mother actually started programming in octal. I don't remember her exact words, but she said something to the effect that her life got so much better when she got an assembler. I suspect that going from assembly to compilers was much the same - you no longer had to worry about register allocations and building stack frames.

ThrowawayR22mo ago

It was a trade-off for a very long time (late 1960s to late 1990s IMO): the output of the early compilers was much less efficient than hand writing assembly language but it enabled less skilled programmers to produce working programs. Compilers pulled ahead when eventually processor ISAs evolved to optimize executing compiler generated code (e.g. the CISC -> RISC transition) and optimizing compilers became practical because of more powerful hardware. It definitely was not an overnight transformation.

loveparade2mo ago· 1 in thread

I see these analogies a lot, but I don't like them. Assembly has a clear contract. You don't need to know how it works because it works the same way each time. You don't get different outputs when you compile the same C code twice.

LLMs are nothing like that. They are probabilistic systems at their very core. Sometimes you get garbage. Sometimes you win. Change a single character and you may get a completely different response. You can't easily build abstractions when the underlying system has so much randomness because you need to verify the output. And you can't verify the output if you have no idea what you are doing or what the output should look like.

lxgr2mo ago

I think these analogies are largely correct, but TFA is about something subtly different:

LLMs don't make it impossible to do anything yourself, but they make it economically impractical to do so. In other words, you'll have to largely provide both your own funding and your own motivation for your education, unless we can somehow restructure society quickly enough to substitute both.

With assembly, we arguably got lucky: It turns out that high-level programming languages still require all the rigorous thinking necessary to structure a programmer's mind in ways that transfer to many adjacent tasks.

It's of course possible that the same is true for using LLMs, but at least personally, something feels substantially different about them. They exercise my "people management" muscle much more than my "puzzle solving" one, and wherever we're going, we'll probably still need some puzzle solvers too.

jurgenburgen2mo ago· 1 in thread

The difference is that you don’t need to review the machine code produced by a compiler.

The same is not true for LLM output. I can’t tell my manager I don’t know how to fix something in production the agent wrote. The equivalent analogy would be if we had to know both the high-level language _and_ assembly.

aworks2mo ago

I was an engineering manager for a commercial C/C++ toolchain used in embedded systems development. We, and our customers, examined the generated code continously. In our case, to figure out better optimizations (and fix bugs). For some of our customers, because their device had severe memory constraints or trying to do difficult performance optimizations.

Moving up to an MMU and running Linux was a different (more abstract) world. Although since it was embedded, low-level functions might still be in both assembly and C if not the apps on top.

lelanthran2mo ago

> He had been working as a programmer for a significantly longer time than me. Long enough that for many years of his career, he had been programming in assembly.

Please, not this pre-canned BS again!

Comparing abstractions to AI is an apples to oranges comparison. Abstractions are dependable due to being deterministic. When I write a function in C to return the factorial of a number, and then reuse it again and again from Java, I don't need a damn set of test cases in Java to verify that factorial of 5 is 120.

With LLMs, you do. They aren't an abstraction, and seeing this worn out, tired and routinely debunked comparison being presented in every bloody thread is wearing a little thin at this point.

We've seen this argument hundreds of times on this very site. Repeating it doesn't make it true.

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