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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure that nowadays much less assembly is written than a few decades ago. Even video games used to be written in assembly. So the demand for assembly programmers went down, and the skill became less useful, unless the supply went down by the same amount.

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You're right, but that doesn't mean those assembly programmers are suddenly forced to write React.

Being an expert at assembly probably means you're an expert in low level programming. We still have a need for those people, because they'll probably also be able to write C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc very competently.

I consider myself pretty competent in C(And C++ to some degree), and I have a pretty good understanding of how computers work on a lower level, but if you ask me to write React UI components, I probably wouldn't fare well. I understand Javascript/Typescript, sure, but I'm just not familiar with the best practices of modern day frontend engineering.

That's the thing with LLMs though. Assembly developers can switch to Rust or something like that. But LLMs probably write C or Go approximately as competently as they write Javascript. There is no commonly used language one could switch to which isn't automated yet.

That I disagree with, though. First of all, Go is a garbage collected language, so can't be compared to C.

C is a language that is able to target basically every platform under the sun. It's versatile: User-space applications, kernel modules, and embedded firmware applications with an RTOS or even running on bare metal.

LLMs can produce basic C code, but (still) struggle with more specialized tasks.

They can be incredibly useful for skimming through long datasheet PDFs, but it's still up to the engineer to actually make sure the code it produces is actually good.

> LLMs can produce basic C code, but (still) struggle with more specialized tasks.

And for how many more months will this state last?

Who knows? I'm an engineer, not a psychic.

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