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I do not wholly agree with you. Just to pick on one thing in your reply...

> Kids these days don’t know basic assembly

It is a problem. Knowing assembly is crucial if we want to have more efficient, faster hardware. Someone has to write kernels and drivers. The efficiencies happening on the lower level of the stack make the upper layers of the stack faster, more stable. It is also important that we have a large pool of devs who know how to do it. Otherwise that knowledge will be taken in-house and shared under strict NDAs preventing devs working for competition and effectively killing all the efforts of the Open Source community to wrangle free access the computer out of the claws of corporations.

This is not a problem that AI has brought about first, but co-pilots are accelerating it.

Just to provide some context, I could not wait for 16-bit, 32-bit, and then 64-bit architectures to become popular. I was the happiest dev around when object oriented programming tools became available, same to Linux, web, all frameworks and even cloud computing. But AI as it is currently being sold is a shit tool. If it stays and doesn't disappear after the VC money runs out, we will have to adapt our ways of working and educational courses to teach devs to review work of others recompiled by AI (it can't write shit on its own). Not sure it is worth the effort, because every time a new framework is introduced the results generated by AI will be of low quality until the models get trained on exaples written by humans... What's the point of using AI in that case?

Agree here. As a 90's kid I dove into computers, Internet and programming head first. I went into the field out of passion, not money. I received an engineering degree.

If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software.

IMHO we will see a brain drain in computer/electronics engineering in 20 years when the pipeline of graduates dwindle and those with experience retire. Hope LLMs can innovate enough to make up, I guess.

> If I was the same kid now, I'd get into a bootcamp or self teach and get a web dev job because the money is lucrative. Yeah sure, maybe i'll dabble in foundationa litems here and there, but most won't. It doesn't advance your career in web/software.

That sure sounds like it has nothing to do with LLMs and everything to do with factors not all related to even computer science. “Capitalism” or maybe the more trendy “late-stage capitalism” is probably more to blame here than anything else.

Also I reject the idea that there are no kids today that get involved in tech/computers for the joy of learning/exploration.

I bristle whenever I see arguments about “kids these days didn’t learn exactly how I did so it must be wrong”. It reeks of “old man yells at cloud” (note, I was also a 90’s kid). It’s the same BS I heard as a kid about how computers would rot your brain or they were horrible for <insert stupid prediction that didn’t come true>.

I agree that it reeks of old men yelling at clouds but there is data driven precedent here: with the advent of smartphones, computer literacy in education has dropped like a rock. It isn’t just kids these days, it’s a genuine shift in computing across the entire populace that happens to really effect the funnel for programmers at the entrance to that funnel. Copilots are an extension of that development, not necessarily something wholly new.

I’ve heard this anecdotally from every educator I know at the high school and college level. CS students are increasingly entering without any computer proficiency whatsoever so it has to be built up from scratch.

Yep, despite all the talk of young people being "digital natives", installing apps from Android/iOS app store, taking pictures and chatting with friends doesn't teach you much that is valuable for office work.

PC gaming and specifically modding is what I can thank for much of my computer proficiency, but even that is easy these days with Steam and its workshops for many games.

Of course you’ve now effectively circled back to the early 1980s at some level when there was not a lot of expectation that college freshmen had touched a computer much less were proficient even if the wanted major in CS/EE.

I hope you're not thinking of the decline of folders - folders aren't fundamental computer science.

I think the apt analogy here isn't "old men yelling at clouds" but the historical way that one certain previous generation become more adept than those before or after at working with a certain then-new technology -- thus becoming a uniquely skilled generation in that technology, moreso than their elders or their youngers, never to be repeated again.

I'm not talking about millenials/gen X with computers -- I'm talking about silent gen/(boomers/greatest gen?) with cars.

In both cases, a new technology dominated the world, but was new and brittle at first. The kids who saw it in their youth were fascinated, but because of its brittleness they had to become at least minor experts in at least minor troubleshooting and mainteanance (like tuning a carburetor or defragging a hard disk) just to access the coolness.

I mean, it really was a pain to be a car owner in 1960. A lot like being a computer owner in 1995. If you wanted to enjoy one, you were going to need to change a spark plug or registry value once in a while. And you had to be ready to recover from an engine overheating or a blue screen of death, because these were not rare events.

Then the future generations increasingly lost touch with those skills because the technology got smoothed out as it developed further.

So I think it's quite plausible that future generations will permanently have less interest in serious skills with computers since the same thing has happened with cars. There is a way smaller perecentage of people my age (millenial) who are "into" cars or have moderate familiarity with car repair than people in their 70s. So it seems plausible the same pattern could continue to play out with computers, rather than a "old man yells at cloud" illusion

> Not sure it is worth the effort, because every time a new framework is introduced the results generated by AI will be of low quality until the models get trained on exaples written by humans... What's the point of using AI in that case?

LLMs will not replace us, they just take some of the tedium out of writing code. Yes, they will have to be trained on new frameworks and languages but I don’t see that as a problem. People have to wait for SO questions and blog posts to be written about new frameworks and languages as it stands today.

I’m not sure I agree with your arguments about needing a lot of devs to understand assembly or the like. Or rather I disagree with your prediction of where that leads. We are effectively already there and it hasn’t led to your future. We have an amazing open source ecosystem and that billions of people rely on daily without knowing how every part of it works. Open source has only grown during that time.

I’ve never done the math myself for calculating the distance between 2 points on a globe. I just grab the Haversine formula and keep going. I don’t see that as a problem. Similarly I’ll reach for an open source library to solve a boring problem instead of doing it myself. I quite literally see no difference in that and using an LLM.

> Knowing assembly is crucial if we want to have more efficient, faster hardware

this is a goal for maybe 2% of the industry. And those folks know their assembler or they don't get hired. I think we are producing skills in the proportion of its requirement in the industry.

Just ask the AI to write your assembly too ;)

Yeah, solving this problem has just about jack to do with "what is being taught."

This is beyond the classroom; this is bad incentives in the market/industry.

> it can't write shit on its own

It sure can when you use multiple agents having discussions and optimizing characteristics with each other. CrewAI and AutoGen come to mind.

I hate to dash your hopes of never seeing LLMs write code again but Llama3 70B is not terrible as a copilot and it’s small enough to run on comparatively cheap hardware or even consumer hardware when quantized plus it’s publicly available so from now on there will always be some form of copilot service or tool that will be in use, that ship has sailed. The good news is that it doesn’t look like we’ve maxed out the capabilities of GPTs yet so as more are trained and compute becomes cheaper and as we produce and accumulate more data they should keep getting better for a while at least.

I agree with you but realistically most people are not ever going to learn that much about their job.

The people who really know the inner workings of things are compensated accordingly and there will always be these kind of people.

> Kids these days don’t know basic assembly, they have no idea what an or/and/nor/xor gate is, they’ve never built a computer from components (no, not cpu/mb/ram/etc, I’m talking transistors and soldering).

At each layer, though, we have a legible formal theory bridging one level to the next, and the abstractions tend to be so reliable the last thing most of us will consider is a hardware/assembler/compiler bug (though they do occasionally happen).

LLMs bridge layers illegibly and probabilistically. I can already see how they're helpful, but they do have some different characteristics that mean reliability and the connection to lower levels of the stack are an issue.

> LLMs bridge layers illegibly and probabilistically.

I’m not sure I agree but I want to make sure we aren’t talking past each other.

Using an LLM to write code does not have this problem IMHO.

Using an LLM as part of the code does have this problem.

I’m not writing off the usefulness of calling out to an LLM from code but it does bring “illegibly and probabilistically” into the mix whereas using an LLM to write code that’s human-reviewed/modified does not.

In fact, you should be unable to tell what I wrote vs what the LLM wrote if I’m doing right (IMHO). “Clever” code is always bad no matter who/what wrote it.

The only time I’ve been asked “did you use <insert LLM> to write this?” Was due to the speed at which I completed something or because it’s in a language that the person asking the question knew I didn’t know very well.

LLM's can be good at guessing the code you want, but I've seen them guess the comment or documentation correctly, then the implementation is the opposite of what you asked. It also generated tests which were for the incorrect case, with comments showing the opposite of what you wanted.

For somebody new at the language or new to programming in general, that difference can be imperceptible until it gets to a review.

I've also managed to spot people using an LLM to write stuff due to them doing things which won't pass linters or code tests.

The subtle differences between comment/code can absolutely be a problem, I’ve fallen prey to it as well but as long as you test/execute the code you’ll catch it if you didn’t catch it from reading over the code. I often reject anything overly clever or that I can’t reason out quickly when it comes to LLM generated code.

As for not passing linters or code tests that’s unacceptable behavior from an employee. If that happened more than a few times I’d be having a talk with the employee followed by showing them the door if they continued to do it. I’d behave the exact same way if no LLM was involved.

I do wish LLMs like Copilot could use the lint rules and/or tests to inform the code they generate but thankfully it’s normally a keystroke away for me to reform a block of code to match the style I prefer so it not the end of the world.

To use LLMs (or any tool) you have to be able to show you can use it correctly, safely, effectively, etc. If you can’t do that then you have no business being in a coding role IMHO.

> All of the tech industry is about standing on the shoulders of giants

This is true, but we still do have to have at least some knowledge of what those giants built. Otherwise we're actually just standing on clouds

Points for a great twisting of the metaphor I used, I quite like it.

I agree _someone_ has to have that knowledge, I reject they _everyone_ must have that knowledge.

I have zero desire to learn more about logic gates, they don’t interest me and while they enable me to do the work I do I don’t need to know about them to do the work. The same way that I couldn’t tell you how my car engines works (ok, at a high level I could, probably about the same level as I could talk about logic gates) but I’m able to drive from point A to point B without issue.

There are people who enjoy assembly, let them work on it. I’m not one of those people and I don’t have a problem with those people but I do have a problem with people who think I must know assembly to be an effective developer.

> I have zero desire to learn more about logic gates

Sure, but you know that they exist, which to me suggests that you learned about them somewhere and probably have at least some foundational understanding of how they work

The problem is when people can skip any of that broad foundation and go straight to specializing somewhere, a lot of general knowledge is lost

Part of learning the broad foundations is also learning that those options exist for a specialization path

Someone who may love working on hardware designs may wind up spending their life as a mediocre web developer because they took an AI assisted web bootcamp that skips learning important fundamentals

But a car engine isn't "just" a car engine.

It's an engine, and can make all kinds of things move.

If you don't know it works, sure you can drive a car, but a lot of missed opportunities to leverage the same exact tech for other use cases disappear when you don't know fundamentals.

> Kids these days don’t know basic assembly

I have to disagree on that one.

Most CS programs will have an assembly class as a mandatory one.

Is it used daily? No. Would they be incredibly rusty and probably require a refresher? Probably, but so would most people on something not used daily.

Interesting, the college I went to (2009) didn’t teach it at all. C++ was the lowest level they taught and they switched to Python after I left (as in they use it instead of c++ last I heard).

If I ever needed to write assembly (which probably means something has gone horribly wrong in my life) then I’m sure I could learn it on the fly, just like I’ve learned other things never taught in college on an as-needed basis.

Very interesting.

Yeah my husbands college (I'm a SW eng, he wants to be one) teaches C++ as the base...and this is a "just" a state school in a Arkansas.

Also gotta correct myself, after asking him it looks like I was wrong. Assembly isn't a direct requirement but it's one of three electives you have to chose from.

You have to choose between either assembly, cybersecurity or data science and assembly is considered the easiest apparently.

(2006) - we had a class/labs on logic gates as well as 2 separate classes that taught asm. I'd say 80% of the labs were C at the time.

It's kind of crazy to think the closest thing to a systems programming language a graduated software engineer knows is freaking python.

Imagine never having used a compiler. Don't get me wrong, people get stuff done with Python and JavaScript, but it's a crazy time we live in.

This argument falls apart for me personally. I'm sure we could go back a decade or two and find someone saying something like:

It’s quite alarming to think that the most advanced language many new software engineers are familiar with is merely C or C++.

Imagine graduating without ever having programmed in assembly. It’s not that C or C++ aren’t capable languages, but we’re definitely in a strange era when the deeper understanding of machine interaction through lower-level programming is becoming a rarity.

I don't think that's quite the same, but in general I agree with that sentiment, even though you weren't serious about it.

Folks should know their basic C/C++ just like they should know enough x86 to make sense of what godbolt.org tells them. But oh, well, that's probably a lonely hill to die on. Having a rough idea of all these levels of abstraction work and interact is something I profit a lot in my line of work, but that's just a small niche and I get that (profiling and optimizing scientific, signal processing routines).

I consider assembly to be a basic skill like arithmetic. Most of us have a calculator on hand 24/7, but being able to look at a clock and say 'I've got 12 minutes' is useful.

I had to take an "operating systems" class in Java 15 years ago, luckily i already knew enough about C and assembly to know it's a waste of time. the professor thought it was more important to teach "fundamentals" than low-level programming.

i got a c in that class (the grade not the language) because i didn't know java and kept having difficulties with the way it forces you to shoehorn OOP into everything.

They didn't teach it at all or you attained a degree without taking it?

I don't remember seeing a class on it but it was a long time ago. I also don't remember it being required to get a degree. I just looked on my college's website and they offer 2 assembly classes it looks like, I'm not sure if they existed when I went there (I assume they did) and neither looks like it's required but I don't have the time or energy to dive back into that kafkaesque hellscape of figuring out what's required to graduate.

However, I didn't get a degree so maybe it was shoehorned into some high level course. I had a job writing software while I was in college and dropped out to do that full time once I felt I wasn't getting any value from continuing my "education". It's never been an issue in my career and I've done well by my own metrics at least.

My kid built an 8 bit cpu based on some YouTube videos he found when he was in high school and some cheap circuits he bought on Amazon.

I’d argue that there are more self-taught kids who know low level programming than 20 years ago.

The information to do this is so much more accessible now and LLMs are a very powerful tool in the hands of someone who is curious and motivated.

I feel comparing knowing assembly to knowing about NAT/Subnets/Gateway is a false equivalency.

Outside of a small set of folks most devs need NOT know assembly due to compilers being very good at converting to assembly.

Not the same Subnet/Gateway/NAT. These are first class constructs in most cloud developments and has huge implications on security, performance and costs. Unless you have some kind of automated way that abstracts away these issues (akin to compilers) most devops folks would need to learn about these concepts while working in a cloud environment.

I don’t follow the analogy with higher-level languages.

Those are robust constructs coming out of fundamental thinking and design.

AI-based copilots, on the other hand, look like unstable libraries sitting on top of those languages.

I think there may be a difference in kind here than with a lot of previous labor-saving abstractions.

To use an LLM, you still need to know the language you are using it to write. You don't need to know C or assembly as a Python/JS programmer today, but you do need to know JS to be an LLM-heavy JS programmer.

Not really? I don’t know JavaScript, just HTML and CSS. I still can make decent web app MVPs using copilot to fill in the blanks.

Okay, but if you don't know what the JS is doing and why how are you ever going to architect stuff efficiently or think up more complex things in the abstract? I fail to see how you can just know HTML and CSS, that's like saying you have the alphabet down but somebody else can speak or write for you. HTML and CSS are just markup and style languages, it isn't really code.

CoPilot is just blundering along using what it has learned from elsewhere - which is not always correct.

> You don't need to know C or assembly as a Python/JS programmer today,

I agree, not everyone does. Maybe we have progressed to the point we can all say those people are wrong and their arguments were always wrong, maybe not.

> but you do need to know JS to be an LLM-heavy JS programmer.

I also agree. That's my whole point, you do need to know the language to be able to effectively use an LLM.

My issue is with people who immediately reject LLMs as a net-bad because they do part of the job for you. I reeks of "well I had to do it the hard way so you do too" which I cannot abide and immediately flips the bozo bit on them for me.