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I've been arguing for years that is isn't optional and treating it like it is is how we ended up with Electron and 400MB JavaScript websites.

When you have no mental model of the machine running your code or what the physical implications of code mean, you fundamentally lack the ability to reason or care about performance. "Works on my machine" is the original vibecoding.

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I take it you listen to Casey Muratori's talks? He talks about this a lot.
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I mean I don't disagree, but there's still a difference in the kind of disconnect you get. The disconnect is harmful in the high-level language case, but it's dangerous and irresponsible with vibe coding/LLMs.

Also, I would argue that a good enough understanding of computer architecture and a mental model of a process' memory layout gets you there, without knowing how to write assembly. That's still a mental model.

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LLMs these days seem to have no problem using language semantics to conceptualize what’s happening in a program. This is my favorite use of an LLM, “why is this library doing x” and then it digs through the library itself in my venv to find an answer.
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Yep, super-duper-google is an unequivocally good use case for LLMs.
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That's not what the LLM is doing. It is guessing at what is happening by regurgitating some docs. It's a more expensive web search.

You also don't have a mental model if you need to ask the LLM about it. This is stuff you should be internalizing.

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You internalize the inner workings of all the libraries in your venv? Impressive! My current project’s uv.lock has ~60 packages in it already, reading and comprehending those tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code must be time consuming.

You’re also just confidently wrong about the model reading the code. It quotes file paths and line numbers and I open and read those files at those line numbers. For me, hallucinations are much more frequent when it references the docs rather than code because docs are more subjective than code.

This is a normal thing I’ve been doing since at least December.

I have to ask — do you actually use LLM coding tools? Your knowledge on this topic seems really out-of-date.

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