Ask HN: How do LLMs perform in the low-level space?
I'm a student in computer science. I'm passionate about all things low-level, especially anything that touches the OS, and embedded too. I love C, Rust, functional languages and lisps. However, everyone around me (webdevs, mostly) tells me all of the above is useless (they're right about the lisps at least, sadly), i should just stick to python and data science or ML, that no humans will be writing code in the future, and all this low-level stuff is from the stoneage and is useless in today's world. If I don't learn ML or data, then I should at least do something creative like frontend webdev. But I hate webdev.
I genuinely can't tell what's real anymore. In my head, the programming roles that will be taken over the fastest will be webdev, especially frontend work (except UX). To my inexperienced eyes, that looks like the easiest, most automatable area of programming (aside from just writing small utilities and scripts). Embedded, compilers, OSdev, etc. should be the last to go, if anything does actually go away (in its current state, i doubt AI can do much except make it harder for juniors to get a first job). Those are "real" programming in my eyes.
But I'm just a student. A first-year, no less. The professionals in my life, people who have worked in IT for decades (I haven't had my first job yet, not even an internship) tell me the complete opposite. Am I just biased? Should I really just give up on what I like? Doing something you love is cool but I'd like to also put food on the table. I want to invest my time in school towards something that won't be completely useless in the future.