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by kleiba2 13 days ago
If we're not writing code by hand anymore anyway, why not skip programming languages altogether and have the AI output machine code right away?
5 comments

Code isn’t just execution, code is also abstraction. You need to be able to understand requirement => unit of work. Unless you’re an uber geek this mostly isn’t the case and reading and retaining any amount of assembly will be practically impossible. In a wishful world you could simply have a bunch of markdown specifications that are executed as machine code. But specifications are by design usually ambiguous, and so you need to build some level of abstraction to be able to accommodate and still understand that. That’s what code does, or should do
Code is for human consumption. Believe it or not, some of us like to understand how things work.
We still want readable language. We still want code we can check and modify ourselves. For now.
It's not portable and in today's world, you have x86 and ARM to contend with. My argument is that should make Java the default language for LLM output.
Then you could have it output LLVM IR
Well you can read python, you can't read machine code...
“Vibe coders” don’t read the code their LLM produces. That’s the whole point.
Thanks for getting what I meant.

More than one reply to my original comment is along the lines of "but humans cannot read/understand machine code effectively". Perhaps instead of starting my comment with "If we're not writing code by hand anymore anyway", I should have said "writing or reading", but it was implied.