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by avaer 20 days ago
Before my time ppl mostly did things in asm, I bet the vast majority of people reading this have never touched assembly and will never have any reason to. This is quickly becoming true of most "code". AI has changed that.

One way to "stay relevant" would be to admit that.

4 comments

Yet as a C developer for 15 years I frequently looked at asm and on occasion even wrote a little.

And that is a far stronger abstraction than LLMs :)

assembly is compiled deterministically so you don't really need to look at it, LLMs though can write a variety of things at random based on the prompt. It is not the same.
How can you evaluate what your compiler is doing without looking at the assembly? The many users of godbolt suggest it's pretty common.
I have also never used punch cards, what does it prove?