I think for programmers the enjoy is to write it by his own, not to just have a toy. If I just want a web server in asm the easiest is to just decompile an existing one into assembly and call it a day.

Only exciting if you already got a lot of programming under your belt, like Carmack, or a product guy.

If you've got an idea that you need assembly language for, you can use a compiler to create that assembly language. It'll probably do a better job than an LLM. Assembly projects are interesting because they're written in assembly, not because they contain assembly.

You won’t be able to enjoy your free time playing with computers if anthropic et al make you jobless.

The “you” doesn’t necessarily refer to you. Im addressing 90% of the developers out there. We love playing around technology… but I doubt we will be thinking the same once we become unemployable. But here we are, having fun with the tools of companies that want to finish us. How ironic

The result is unimpressive either way -- it's the journey that is exciting for these kinds of projects

It has always been possible to do it. LLMs are not a particular enabler for that.

The difference is that now it is worthless: there is no learning, no person caring about the result, nothing aspirational for the public to look towards... we used to enjoy those challenges, used to be proud of solving complex problems... now? Yeah, whatever, execute execute commit push, let another LLM "review" and call it a day.

> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing

But you're not doing it. The ai is doing it.

If the op can write a web server in assembly language then I'm pretty sure they could have done it in a higher-level language. But they did what they did for the journey and the learning along the way. Vibe coding it omits all that, and misses the point of the exercise.

I do believe this is just a next step in languages. We've come this far trying to make code NLP, now we have the closest thing to a translator in our generation. It's an exciting time, just don't pay attention to talking heads.

> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of.....

Nobody actually needs a web server built in assembly language, it serves no practical purpose. And I say that as someone who learned to program 6502 assembly language in 1983 and has sporadically used assembly of various architectures since.

The absurdity of building it would have been the curiosity draw pre-LLMs, but when it existing is just a series of prompts away it really loses all of its meaning.

But yeah... hooray for AI. Can't wait until we learn to harness it to supercharge the most important and valuable thing we do as a human society in modern times: stuff increasingly intrusive ads in front of everyone at all times.

Which is why now companies can happily reduce head count.

> without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.

Isn't that kind of view pathetic and sad, though? Why would anyone pick up and guitar or play a piano if they could just listen to the same song already made by someone else? I struggle to understand this view of people that pretend to not understand why being an expert of some skill is perceived as valuable by some people. This is also belies next problem with this line of thinking which is that it says "we don't need to learn X to do Y because we have AI" but misses the same AI could easily replace the need to have you think to do Y in the first place. I don't know.