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Comment by largbae | Hacker News Reader

My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.

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Comparison never made sense to me

1/ When dealing with High level language I am not seeing assembly or the language it compiles to. It's not a leaky abstraction

2/ It's deterministic

The day my markdown file is the thing I deploy on AWS your analogy will stand

You also don't need to directly maintain or evolve the generated machine code to fix bug or add new features.

I like it when AI metaphors presume determinism.

As jatins says: Why bother with source code? just deploy prompts and specs. It’s rare for C programmers to care about assembly, or python programmer to care about C. Why do you care that much about source code?

You clearly don't know what you're talking about if you think compilers are a good analogy.

They really are though. There seems to be some confusion about "determinism" as if everyone writes perfect code and every compiler interprets that code perfectly. There's bugs and nondeterminism in every step of the chain with human coders and, say, a .NET compiler too. The idea that we've got coding down to a pristine and exact science and AI is some random chaos element that muddies it makes no sense to me after seeing how most human created code works.

When it comes to non-determinism, the occasional bug or optimization difference in a compiler is not even in the same category as the 50+% chance of a different answer every time that you get with llms.

Yup, these people don't understand between "non-determinism" because of a bug, and as the fundamental way of working.

What programmer codes exactly the way of any other programmer? Human ability to write code is dependent on time allowed, how hungry they are, how much sleep they got and a million other non-determined factors.

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