Does ‘writing code by hand’ mean you’re not going to use compilers to generate assembly?

Now I do feel lucky that I started learning coding about four years before the LLM revolution, but these things are really just natural language compilers, aren’t they? We’re just in that period - the 1980s, the greybeards tell me - where companies charged thousands of dollars per compiler instance, right? And now, I myself have never paid for a compiler.

This whole investor bubble will blow up in the face of the rentier-finance capitalists and I’ll be laughing my head off while it happens.