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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

Really not the same. Assembly / machine code is entirely deterministic - they are a notation for your thoughts. LLM produced content is more a smorgasbord of other people's thoughts, and cannot help you with clarity, conviction, etc etc.

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Yes Assembly is deterministic (barring severe hardware bugs). But that's the point. People are no longer writing Assembly.

They meant to say that swithing from assembly to high-level programming is not the same as switching from high-level programming to LLMs, because the latter loses you the guarantee that the computer will do what you told it to.

Sure, it's less common that people are writing full-fledged applications in nothing but assembly.

However, I would strongly disagree that people are no longer writing/using assembly. I was writing a bit of assembly the other day, for example.

Come on over to the game emulation, reverse engineering, exploitation writing, CTF, malware analysis, etc. hobby spaces. Knowledge of assembly is absolutely mandatory to do essentially anything useful.

Great examples, those.

Here's another:

https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp/blob/main/sectorlisp.S

Given this, you might write less asm.

My point is that the coding LLMs are another point on the reliability / ease of use spectrum. We already mostly moved to another point with HLL compilers from machine language. This is another leap where the transform is unreliable but it's very easy to use (and it could preserve output edits, to some indeterminate extent).

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