Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way.
Look to the positive instead of lamenting something that never would have happened.
It's unbelievably exciting that you can now program a computer virtually without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.
Only exciting if you already got a lot of programming under your belt, like Carmack, or a product guy.
1. the time for optimisation is limited
2. the constraints are overlapping and just completely intractable beyond a single function (do you want to inline this, saving on the call and increasing binary size, or not do it because it's cold?)
3. they don't have domain-specific knowledge about your code, and even with PGO, they might incorrectly decide what's hot and what's not - typical example are program settings. You didn't enable a setting during PGO instrumentation, compiler sees you didn't call that path, shoves it out of line. Now your PGO-optimised code is worse than -O2. And compilers have different levels of adherence to manual branch hinting - on MSVC you get a reorder at best, Clang and GCC try much harder at [[likely]] and [[unlikely]].
4. There's still quite a bit of low-hanging fruit left, mostly because progress is jagged ;) For example our calling conventions generally suck - this is actually why inlining is so helpful - and the inertia makes everyone emit the default calling convention and that's it.
For example, did you know that compilers have very inconsistent support for struct unpacking? It can be much faster to write
int32 meow(int64 a, int64 b);
struct mytype {
int64 x;
int64 y;
};
int32 meow(mytype a);
These examples might seem a bit cherrypicked but this is only scratching the surface, not to talk about the codegen in higher-level languages, which is even more dreadful. Manually optimising your code can usually get a magnitude worth of free performance, which is just tragic.
I wouldn't even rule out LLM codegen in the future - although they're quite unreliable today so you'd get miscompiles like crazy - but there's just so much low-hanging fruit left on the table that it wouldn't be too out of step...
The “you” doesn’t necessarily refer to you. Im addressing 90% of the developers out there. We love playing around technology… but I doubt we will be thinking the same once we become unemployable. But here we are, having fun with the tools of companies that want to finish us. How ironic
For me it's about making the computer do awesome things - I do not care how I get there I just want it to do whatever I can conjure in my head.
And a fair aside, the result will be "good enough" approximation of what I conjured in my head, but never the thing itself. For me to do the exact thing I conjured in my head it will require to pick up the mouse and draw the rest of the owl. I don't know if that's more telling of my imagination being demanding or my standards.
Probably not the case for anime pictures, but in other domains, you can use chatGPT as a first level and then go on the improve it from there. To make a parallel: if you draw with a pencil on a piece of paper, you would still think of yourself a doer even if you did not manufacture your pencil or paper.
So far I can't say the same for leveraging LLM's and, in the off-chance that there is, we have an entire software development industry that doesn't even know how to filter for "it".
When I go on a trek, the end of trek landmark is nowhere nearly as significant as the experience of reaching it.
If I were to be magically transported there without the lives experience it would take almost all of the joy out of it. Some people get a kick out of doing hard things that are interesting but seemingly beyond one's ability. Making it an easy commodity spoils the fun.
As for teleportation, if it were, say, trip to moons of Saturn I can make exceptions.
Sure, if you want 300,000 spoons, it’s far better to use a factory process and get essentially identical results. But if you only want a few spoons and accept (or even value) that the spoons will all be a little different, hand-forging them is quite enjoyable.
I’ve written enough assembly and done enough blacksmithing to know that the metaphor isn’t quite apt. But there’s both tremendous effort and satisfaction involved in both.
The difference is that now it is worthless: there is no learning, no person caring about the result, nothing aspirational for the public to look towards... we used to enjoy those challenges, used to be proud of solving complex problems... now? Yeah, whatever, execute execute commit push, let another LLM "review" and call it a day.
I wouldn’t be sad about defeating lower complexity challenges. There are always higher complexity challenges that arise once we start operating in a world when you can do more. The bar raises.
Once insurmountable challenges are now trivial to implement with, as you say, "low effort."
For those who were attracted to computing by the grind and the grand narrative that you, too, with sufficient effort, discipline, and merit, could become a revered craftsman, LLMs trivialize an entire lifetime of practice. I can't think of anything more demoralizing.
The equivalent is something like hand tool woodworking - it’s still a thing despite the advent of machines, but more of a niche. You can still aim to become excellent, but maybe you won’t be famous.
Or employable. Which sucks if you're over 50.
Writing whole software projects in assembly has been worthless and pointless for a couple of decades now. Even the projects who can put together a solid case will limit assembly to very specific components executed only in specific bits of a hot path. Perhaps the most performance-sensitive code we have today is high frequency trading and that field is dominated by C++.
Also, virtually all mainstream compiler suites have flags that output assembly,and that feature is largely ignored and unused.
What's next, human human contact abstracted away by brain stimulation?
And the transhumanist arsewipes gonna have a field day.
Never too late to ignite the nukes...
Of course! Corona/junta/scarecrowvirus don't transmit over the wire, while ads, taxes and surveillance do alright!
But you're not doing it. The ai is doing it.
If the op can write a web server in assembly language then I'm pretty sure they could have done it in a higher-level language. But they did what they did for the journey and the learning along the way. Vibe coding it omits all that, and misses the point of the exercise.
Nobody actually needs a web server built in assembly language, it serves no practical purpose. And I say that as someone who learned to program 6502 assembly language in 1983 and has sporadically used assembly of various architectures since.
The absurdity of building it would have been the curiosity draw pre-LLMs, but when it existing is just a series of prompts away it really loses all of its meaning.
But yeah... hooray for AI. Can't wait until we learn to harness it to supercharge the most important and valuable thing we do as a human society in modern times: stuff increasingly intrusive ads in front of everyone at all times.
Wasn’t it used for that before anything else? Google invented transformers and had LLMs internally before chatgpt got released. Presumably they were using them for ads, because their public demos were insane things like talking to the moon.
According to friends who worked at Google (no direct knowledge myself, so don't know exactly how true it is), they mostly sat on the tech. Google News had internal prototypes of using them to expand/contract/summarise and/or add details/context to news articles and translate them to different languages, but it was never fully productised.
Then after ChatGPT got popular, sudden panic to start using them in products company-wide.
Isn't that kind of view pathetic and sad, though? Why would anyone pick up and guitar or play a piano if they could just listen to the same song already made by someone else? I struggle to understand this view of people that pretend to not understand why being an expert of some skill is perceived as valuable by some people. This is also belies next problem with this line of thinking which is that it says "we don't need to learn X to do Y because we have AI" but misses the same AI could easily replace the need to have you think to do Y in the first place. I don't know.
So, in my view, more people will (or should) understand now what is hard when building complex things, if they pass the stage of "I have a nice POC that works for this one case".
Some 120 years ago recordings music was a living phenomena produced in the moment. Musicians worked at restaurants and coffee shops everywhere, being useful without being super stars.
Music didn’t disappear with recordings, but the works is certainly different.
I mourn the death of a human artform.
Yes, an LLM can write it, it’ll probably work. Yet, it’ll remain meaningless slop while this is not.
I'm afraid it's an elite skill in the sense that juggling is also an elite skill. It's impressive for the first few seconds you gaze into it, but once the novelty factor wears off you understand that it's wasted effort that leads to a project that suffers from a massive maintainability problem, is limited in which platforms it can run, and brings no advantage whatsoever. It's an gimmick that has no practice use.
This is the software development equivalent of an amateur guitarist posting shredding videos on YouTube.
In the same way we appreciate Japanese wood joinery, why not not just appreciate this? Someone might even learn a trick or two reading it.
No, not really. This is exactly the opposite example of software craftsmanship. Software craftsmanship involves things like technical excellence in delivering maintainable software that is adaptable to change.
Picking assembly, of all things, for a web server represents a complete failure in the analysis of both the problem and solution domain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_craftsmanship
This sort of project is more in line with parlour tricks, juggling, and stunt shows. Trying to frame this sort of project as software craftsman is like discussing the whole Jackass series as cinema next to Hitchcock and Scorcese. It may take skill and practice to be punched in the nuts, but that doesn't make it a craft.
To which change, exactly?
We need to stop thinking of software as carpenters where the magic is some physical skill and that is the "CRAFT WE MUST PROTECCT".
And at least your comment was grounded in reality; a lot of people I talk to (who are not coders) seem to think a good software engineer writes every line and every word with thoughtful genius and AI just spams code so one is better than the other. And they are convinced its some naunced smart take and they understand software development on a inner level or whatever.
And the base assumption still holds true (pure AI-generated code is garbage) but its mostly because its badly designed and is still a pretty poor architect. And there is a need to pushback against slop but why do we need to elevate typing code as if its some sacred acctivity? Most of the work a good coder does is in their mind with little connection to the phyiscal reality of the world.