zlacker

>>strayd+(OP)
Clearly written by someone who has no systems of importance in production. If my code fail people loose money, planes halts, cars break down. Read. The. Code.

>>frank0+bm
Yes, but also ... the analogy to assembly is pretty good. We're moving pretty quickly towards a world where we will almost never read the code.

You may read all the assembly that your compiler produces. (Which, awesome! Sounds like you have a fun job.) But I don't. I know how to read assembly and occasionally do it. But I do it rarely enough that I have to re-learn a bunch of stuff to solve the hairy bug or learn the interesting system-level thing that I'm trying to track down if I'm reading the output of the compiler. And mostly even when I have a bug down at the level where reading assembly might help, I'm using other tools at one or two removes to understand the code at that level.

I think it's pretty clear that "reading the code" is going to go the way of reading compiler output. And quite quickly. Even for critical production systems. LLMs are getting better at writing code very fast, and there's no obvious reason we'll hit a ceiling on that progress any time soon.

In a world where the LLMs are not just pretty good at writing some kinds of code, but very good at writing almost all kinds of code, it will be the same kind of waste of time to read source code as it is, today, to read assembly code.

>>kwindl+Vn
I think it's the performative aspects that are grating, though. You're right that even many systems programmers only look at the generated assembly occasionally, but at least most of them have the good sense to respect the deeper knowledge of mechanism that is to be found there, and many strive to know more eventually. Totally orthogonal to whether writing assembly at scale is sensible practice or not.

But with the AI tools we're not yet at the wave of "sometimes it's good to read the code" virtue signaling blog posts that will make front page next year or so, and still at the "I'm the new hot shit because I don't read code" moment, which is all a bit hard to take.