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He's implementing his own language, so it seems it would be useful for debugging his own compiler. In other words, the IR he's generating is not really for anybody else, it's for himself.

You can trivially dump your module to a file with the actual LLVM API using `LLVMPrintModuleToFile`, even if the module is in the middle of being built.

It's easier to emit human-readable LLVM IR if you're just playing around (or are using a language without good LLVM bindings), but it's strictly inferior to using the actual API

Its probably a little easier to reason about when you're toying around. The article does suggest using the API for any serious project.

It would be useful in testing the later stages of the compiler.

Compiler Basics: LLVM