LLMs promote a decoupling of mental models and the actual codebase.
As much as some may want to believe, just reviewing what the LLM outputs is not equivalent to thinking about implementation details, motivations, exactly how and why things are, and how and why they work the way they do, and then writing it yourself. The process itself is what instills that knowledge in you.
Sucks for people who were invested in contributing to Bun and don't like working with AI tools to be sure, but I think the writing was on the wall for them pretty much immediately post-acquisition. You must admit, it's hard to predict that 100% of source lines will be written by AI if you're not walking the walk!
That is if you use something like C, C+=, Java, .NET, Go. With Javascript and Python I don't think knowing assembly would make any difference because it's hard to optimize the code in these languages for how the CPU and memory works.
The same applies to vibe coding: the best "vibe coder" will paradoxically be the person with enough knowledge and curiosity to understand programming, how computer works and the subject at hand; one that could write the whole thing from scratch so they have enough judgement to review generated code.
Of course the vast majority will be mediocre vibe coders, and even worse programmers; at least that's the direction we're going.
- the scale of how much and how fast you can generate code with AI vs how fast can you write code for compiler
- the mental model of what is being generated and how much the contributor understands and owns the generated code
High-level languages can certainly yield inefficient code when compiled, or maybe different code among different compilers, but they're always meant to allow their users to know exactly what to expect from what they put together in their programs. I've always considered this a hard fact, I simply cannot wrap my head around working in a way that forces me to abandon this basic assumption.
So it is not, by your own admission, "exactly, literally the same".
Vide-coders often don't read, let alone understand, the code they send for PRs.
(Though I don't know if this particular patch series would get accepted on its own merits.)
split into a bunch of much smaller changes?
There's no reason to assume my generic statement was talking about the ugly version rather than the nicely organized version.