alt Hacker NewsAI is creating problems. This isn’t one of them. Engineers are going to now think at a higher level of abstraction. No one misses coding in assembly.
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You can write unambiguous (UB-free) code and the compiler's output will be deterministic. There will even be a spec that explains how your source maps to your program's behavior. LLM has neither.
Also, if you need to control performance, you still need to know how CPU cache and branch prediction works, both of which exists at the abstraction level of assembly.
Compilers are a layer of abstraction that we can ask another human about. Some human is there taking care of it. Until we get to the point where we trust AI with our survival it would be good to be able to audit the entire stack.
I suspect there are at least as many programmers working as the ASM level today than there ever was - they're a lower proportion, but the total number of programmers has increased dramatically.
I wonder if this sort of trend will continue?
At a high level of abstraction, the product owner can talk to the LLM directly by themselves. The "engineers" will have abstracted themselves out of a job.
Look at the comments about MSVC removing inline assembly as a supported feature for a counterexample. :D
(A competent assembly programmer can go miles around a competent high-level programmer, that's still true in 2026...)
> No one misses coding in assembly.
It's only your opinion that is provably false.
First, there are still people who don't like high level languages and don't use them, because they find assembly better.
Second, I personally work in a field where I need to consult the source of truth, the actual binary, and not the high level source code - precisely because the high level of abstraction is obscuring the real mechanics of software and someone needs to debug and clean up the mess done by "high level thinkers".
High level programming languages are only an illusion (albeit a good one) but good engineers remember that illusion is an illusion.