alt Hacker NewsThey don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.
I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out cookie cutter CRUD apps.
I have my doubts about whether the state of the industry is going to advance as long as we're having LLMs do all the creation, but that's another diatribe.
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> They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.
I suspect that despite its translation abilities, this is true, but I'd like to see it do things in languages that are more or less appropriate for tasks to see how much the training corpus matters vs. its ability to translate. Assembly is a bit of an extreme example because you're either writing it as close to C as possible (C is essentially portable assembly) or you're writing complex, unreviewable code that happens to work. And who know if it's been trained on register allocation, or resorts to doing everything on the stack because it works.
What's there to advance to?
Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.
It's still possible to make CRUD apps in assembly with an AI agent but it would be a research project.
>They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.
I'm disputing this. You can have a training corpus in assembly as big as any other language: just feed the compiled result(in assembly) of the CRUD apps to the LLMs.
Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa...
WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common.
Fable didn't even need to debug it; I believe essentially all the assembly worked correctly on the first try.
I have feelings about this, but I'm not pretending it isn't real.