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A comment on The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code. Parent comment

Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by adrian_b on Sunday April 26, 2026 @04:58AM (#47908659)
Indeed, even if were possible for someone to create any program most of the time just by directing a team of AI agents, when something does not work one needs the ability to zoom in through the abstraction levels and understand exactly the program that is executed, so only knowing to generate prompts becomes insufficient.

This is the same with compilers. Most of the time a programmer needs to know only the high-level language that is used for writing the program. Nevertheless, when there is a subtle bug or just the desired performance cannot be reached, a programmer who also understands the machine language of the processor has a great advantage by being able to solve the bug or the performance problem, which without such knowledge would be solved in much more time or never.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by don_esteban on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:40AM (#47909510)
1) luckily, nowadays compiler's bugs surface very rarely, as the average programmer does not have capability to solve such issues

2) unfortunately, LLM's, by their very nature (not having a model of what they do, are prone to introducing subtle bugs, i.e. it is like programming in high-level language whose compiler likes to wing it

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by SleepyMyroslav on Sunday April 26, 2026 @06:49AM (#47909221)
I don't think compilers are a good example. The economics of software development has won a long time ago. For example in Gamedev with well known soft real-time requirements people (mostly) stopped doing that machine code dance many hardware generations ago. Like it happened with memory optimizations: people measure memory in GB now not in KB =)

I am sure programmers cherish every case when they can do micro optimization but in the retrospect the high level cuts is what made the system fit the perf or memory budget.

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Re:The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting H... by atq2119 on Sunday April 26, 2026 @10:55AM (#47910841)
Gamedev dev is a good example actually. True, handwritten assembly has gone out of style. But knowing how caches work, and how to lay out data to improve performance is important. And stuff like vector intrinsics also gets used.
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