[jhbadger]

Read the famous "Story of Mel" [1] about Mel Kaye, who refused to use optimizing assemblers in the late 1950s because "you never know where they are going to put things". Even in the 1980s you used to find people like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel

[ThrowawayR2]

The Story of Mel counts against the narrative because Mel was so overwhelmingly skilled that he was easily able to outdo the optimizing compiler.

[sanderjd]

I don't think that does count against the narrative? The narrative is just that each time we've moved up the abstraction chain in generating code, there have been people who have been skeptical of the new level of abstraction. I would say that it's usually the case that highly skilled operators at the previous level remain more effective than the new adopters of the next level. But what ends up mattering more in the long run is that the higher level of abstraction enables a lot more people to get started and reach a basic level of capability. This is exactly what's happening now! Lots of experienced programmers are not embracing these tools, or are, but are still more effective just writing code. But way more people can get into "vibe coding" with some basic level of success, and that opens up new possibilities.

[ThrowawayR2]

The narrative is that non-LLM adopters will be left behind, lose their jobs, are Luddites, yadda yadda yadda because they are not moving up the abstraction layers by adopting LLMs to improve their output. There is no point in the timeframe of the story at which Mel would have benefitted from a move to a higher abstraction level by adopting the optimizing compiler because its output will always be drastically inferior to his own using his native expertise.

[sanderjd]

That's not the narrative in this thread. That's a broader narrative than the one in this thread.

And yes, as I said, the point is not that Mel would benefit, it's that each time a new higher level of abstraction comes onto the scene, it is accessible to more people than the previous level. This was the pattern with machine code to symbolic assembly, it was the pattern with assembly to compiled languages, with higher level languages, and now with "prompting".

The comment I originally replied to implied that this current new abstraction layer is totally different than all the previous ones, and all I said is that I don't think so, I think the comparison is indeed apt. Part of that pattern is that a lot of new people can adopt this new layer of abstraction, even while many people who already know how to program are likely to remain more effective without it.