I remember when everyone bemoaned the kids not knowing assembly language. How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly?

“Kids these days don’t work as hard / know as much / value the important things” is as tired as it is universal.

OK sure, but back when old heads were complaining about the kids not knowing assembly, those same kids knew C or Fortran or something.

In 2026, if you call yourself a developer and can't solve FizzBuzz without help, it's hard to argue that you know anything useful at all.

Do modern languages and compilers count as “help”? Because I could probably do fizzbuzz in x86 assembly, but it would take a while to page that back in, and I suspect most people who call themselves developers today simply could not do it without help.

> I could probably do fizzbuzz in x86 assembly

How? Fizzbuzz requires you to produce output; that's not functionality that CPU instructions provide.

You can call into existing functionality that handles it for you, but at that point what are you objecting to about the 'modern language'?

You'd just call printf from assembly by knowing the ABI by heart.

Well I could certainly assemble the string buffer. And if I can run dosbox, I can output to the screen buffer at 0xB800.

I’m not objecting to modern languages, I’m just saying that using them fails the “can write fizzbuzz with no help” test to only a slightly lesser degree than using AI tools. They’re a complex compile- and runtime environment that most developers don’t truly understand.

The time may come when we can treat regular programming as a lower layer niche field the way we treat assembly today.

I don't think we're close to that time yet. Just like as a kid I was told to prove my work by hand even if I could do it in my head, and just like we learned how to do calculus without a calculator and then learned how to use the calculator to get the same result, I think we still need the software field to learn programming concepts independent of the use of AI to create code.

I don't think you can be a good "prompt engineer" for solid software in 2026 if you don't understand programming concepts and software architecture and flow.

I generally agree, but it’s just a matter of time, and even today people with domain expertise in other areas (accounting, weather, etc) are producing adequate tools using nothing but prompt engineering. Many caveats of course, but I still think 90% of the distaste for mere prompt engineers comes from “kids these days; my unique knowledge is irreplaceable and they don’t even value it” thing.

Adequate for what/who? I can 3d print and cobble together a lock for my bedroom door but I would never be able to work as an engineer producing real locks.

> How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly?

I'm genuinely curious how someone who never wrote a program in assembly, or debugged a program machine instruction by machine instruction, can really understand how software works. My working hypothesis is most of them don't and actually it's fine because they don't need it.

"Assembly" is just another virtual machine instruction format sitting atop another, mildly better-hidden, pile of abstractions.

Depending on the particular processor.

....Or you know it's actually true some of the times. Standardized test scores have bombed hard across the US in the last decade due to smartphones being wildly present in schools without control. Kids brains are legitimately rotted by a machines running software maximized to destroy the attention centers of their brains for life.

AI is just the icing on the cake. These kids are so cooked with developmentally stunted brains that they are forced to use AI as a crutch to function.