It's far more exciting than sad.

Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way.

Look to the positive instead of lamenting something that never would have happened.

It's unbelievably exciting that you can now program a computer virtually without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.

It doesn't diminish the art form though. If anything, I value these kinds of hand written projects even more now that so many people are pulled in by AI doing their projects for them in a fraction of the time and effort. I love doing these kinds of projects, and I love writing assembly, but I must admit that the temptation of just copy pasting generated code is big sometimes, because it's _right there_. In this context, seeing someone handwriting something awesome by hand is even more valuable to me.

I think that the analogy of recorded music best captures your feeling. Not the exact technological and economic transformation that is happening, but the feeling.

Some 120 years ago recordings music was a living phenomena produced in the moment. Musicians worked at restaurants and coffee shops everywhere, being useful without being super stars.

Music didn’t disappear with recordings, but the works is certainly different.

The answer is "no time at all." I used Gemini Ultra earlier this year to see how well it would do with some really gnarly assembler. I asked it to write a whole flat-shaded 3D engine in 8086 assembler that would run in CGA on an original XT and it one-shotted it in a couple of minutes.

https://imgur.com/a/Dy5rUku

Haven't used LLMs for assembly yet, I did try to use it on some DSLs with few docs, the results were much less impressive than those with popular, higher level languages AI companies scraped a gazillion repos for.

  I mourn the death of a human artform.

Human artform is still alive and well as evidenced by this post.

Yes, an LLM can write it, it’ll probably work. Yet, it’ll remain meaningless slop while this is not.

> Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this.

I'm afraid it's an elite skill in the sense that juggling is also an elite skill. It's impressive for the first few seconds you gaze into it, but once the novelty factor wears off you understand that it's wasted effort that leads to a project that suffers from a massive maintainability problem, is limited in which platforms it can run, and brings no advantage whatsoever. It's an gimmick that has no practice use.

This is the software development equivalent of an amateur guitarist posting shredding videos on YouTube.

I get what you mean but I feel this new profound yearning for "hand-crafted" code is getting a bit out of hand. Software engineers have taken shortcuts whenever possible since software was a thing. Do you also mourn that we don't code airplanes by hand anymore (i.e. the death of the "craft of coding").

We need to stop thinking of software as carpenters where the magic is some physical skill and that is the "CRAFT WE MUST PROTECCT".

And at least your comment was grounded in reality; a lot of people I talk to (who are not coders) seem to think a good software engineer writes every line and every word with thoughtful genius and AI just spams code so one is better than the other. And they are convinced its some naunced smart take and they understand software development on a inner level or whatever.

And the base assumption still holds true (pure AI-generated code is garbage) but its mostly because its badly designed and is still a pretty poor architect. And there is a need to pushback against slop but why do we need to elevate typing code as if its some sacred acctivity? Most of the work a good coder does is in their mind with little connection to the phyiscal reality of the world.