[sothatsit]

I continue to write codebases in programming languages, not English. LLM agents just help me manipulate that code. They are tools that do work for me. That is delegation, not abstraction.

To write and review a good spec, you also need to understand your codebase. How are you going to do that without reading the code? We are not getting abstracted away from our codebases.

For it to be an abstraction, we would need our coding agents to not only write all of our code, they would also need to explain it all to us. I am very skeptical that this is how developers will work in the near future. Software development would become increasingly unreliable as we won't even understand what our codebases actually do. We would just interact with a squishy lossy English layer.

[dhorthy]

You don’t think early c programmers spent a lot of time reading the assembly that was produced?

[sarchertech]

No not really. They didn’t need to spend a lot of time looking at the output because (especially back then) they mostly knew exactly what the assembly was going to look like.

With an LLM, you don’t need to move down to the code layer so you can optimize a tight loop. You need to look at the code so you can verify that the LLM didn’t write a completely different program that what you asked it to write.

[sothatsit]

Probably at first when the compiler was bad at producing good assembly. But even then, the compiler would still always produce code that matches the rules of the language. This is not the case with LLMs. There is no indication that in the future LLMs will become deterministic such that we could literally write codebases in English and then "compile" them using an LLM into a programming language of our choice and rely on the behaviour of the final program matching our expectations.

This is why LLMs are categorically not compilers. They are not translating English code into some other type of code. They are taking English direction and then writing/editing code based upon that. They are working on a codebase alongside us, as tools. And then you still compile that code using an actual compiler.

We will start to trust these tools more and more, and probably spend less time reviewing the code they produce over time. But I do not see a future where professional developers completely disregard the actual codebase and rely entirely on LLMs for code that matters. That would require a completely different category of tools than what we have today.

[rsynnott]

I mean, the ones who were actually _writing_ a C compiler, sure, and to some who were in performance critical spaces (early C compilers were not _good_). But normal programmers, checking for correctness, no, absolutely not. Where did you get that idea?

(The golden age of looking at compiler-generated assembly would've been rather later, when processors added SIMD instructions and compilers started trying to get clever about using them.)