alt Hacker NewsI don’t know how stupid of a suggestion this is, but if no one is reading the code anymore (I do, but I hear many in much more elite shops than mine do not), then should we not just be using AI to write binary or machine code?
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Even when no(human)body is reading the code, AI is still reading the code in order to "understand" it. Languages that can express high level concepts, use structured programming for recognizable control flow patterns instead of inscrutable jumps, and assign names to things have the same benefits for the AI-coders and AI-reviewers that they always have for humans.
Personal responsibility will always exist at the touchpoints of software and human activity. Concentration and scope of responsibility may vary, and the degree to which that person needs to understand the code will vary as a result, but the need for a human to be able to read and understand code is going to be around for a very long while still.
I think that just like humans, AI will make logical mistakes at some rate linked to lines of code.
Like I remember reading human studies that people make 1.5 - 5 errors per 100 loc.
If AI works in a similar way then we should stick to higher level languages that minimize loc
Machine code isn't especially expressive per line or unit of code. Lower level languages takes up more of an LLM's context than higher level ones.
To be effective in using low level languages, LLMs would have to build higher level constructs like subroutines from scratch every program.
It's not that different from why we almost never use assembler for anything more than code islands: even a modest subroutine can overwhelm our own mental context window.