alt Hacker News> Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant.
I have the opposite opinion. As LLM become ubiquitous and code generation becomes cheap, the choice of language becomes more important.
The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand the mountain of code that it is going to generate?
I use LLM at work in Python. It can, and will, easily use hacks upon hacks to get around things.
Thus I maintain that as code generation is cheap, it is more important to constraint that code generation.
All of this assume that you care even a tiny bit about what is happening in your code. If you don't, I suppose you can keep banging the LLM to fix that binary blob for you.
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> As LLM become ubiquitous and code generation becomes cheap, the choice of language becomes more important.
I think, changes to languages/tooling to accomodate Agentic loops will become important.
> All of this assume that you care even a tiny bit about what is happening in your code. If you don't...
I mean, as software engineers, we most certainly do. I suspect there'll be a new class of "developers" who will have their own way of making software, dealing with bugs, building debugging tools that suit their SDLC etc. LLMs will be to software development what Relativity was to Astrophysics, imo: A fundamental & permanent shift.
Lets say years of offshoring projects have helped to reach that opinion.
> The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand the mountain of code that it is going to generate?
As a very practical problem the assembly would consume the context window like no other. And another is having some static guardrails; sometimes LLMs make mistakes, and without guard rails it debugging some of them becomes quite a big workload.
So to keep things efficient, an LLM would first need to create its own programming language. I think we'll actually see some proposals for a token-effective language that has good abstraction abilities for this exact use.