For one thing, who said “everyone”?

We do still read code. => We do still read Assembly code in the world of compilers.

Deterministic vs None-Deterministic

Heck, OpenAI can't even get their models to reliably do what they intend, so yeah.

AOT without PGO, manual memory management, traditional optimisations vs AOT with PGO, JIT, tracing GC, machine learning optimisation passes.

Which have what to do with the relationship between the assembly and the higher level language?

It is the answer to you Deterministic vs None-Deterministic.

If you don't get the difference, I get there isn't much that you know about how instruction selection works, across all those approaches.

Ok, I feel you know what this is actually about, but here spelled out:

Do any of the optimizations you mentioned affect the underlying behavior of the run code? Does the source ever lead to a different observable behavior? If not, it doesn't fit to LLM use, where this is very much the case.

There is the observable behaviour, and the machine code instructions that actually get generated in every single case for the same kind of text input.

Which for example, unless you can exactly replicate the world every single time a PGO data gathering session is done, there are no guarantees that the compiler will generate exactly the same machine code pattern, when given various PGO files generated at different occurrences.

Thanks, yes. To get back to the "We do still read Assembly code in the world of compilers" analogy, in the case of LLM usage, the observable behaviour is...

Assembly naturally,

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Frame-X11-Server-Assembly

Not seeing it. “We do still read code” implies neither that every single person does, nor that they need to master the language being read. Taken together, it sems to me that you need a fair bit of extrapolation to make the analogy work.

Which tangentially brings up another analogy: many high level languages don’t compile directly to assembly but to an intermediate language first (LLVM). We don’t read the LLVM code ourselves.

But LLVM compilation is deterministic. LLM code gen isn’t.

Only when not used alongside PGO data or as a JIT, as its inputs are not deterministic in first place.

No it isn’t. I think you read into my comment too much.

I don't want to say what people should and shouldn't do, and a world in which all the world's professionals spend their days talking to sycophantic machines with only a loose commitment to the truth is really funny to me.

But, high level languages don't really lose precision in any way that matters (except when you need extreme performance, resistance to timing attacks, or niche stuff like that). Natural language on the other hand loses precision that's usually important, so I don't see how your comparison is valid.