Back in the day, the argument was that compilers produce unreadable assembly, so people used to writing assembly were arguing against the use of compilers.

Compilers also had bugs, so we still had to debug the assembly to understand how to fix the problem. Nowadays, almost nobody has to resort to those steps, except of course compiler developers. But that is just a testament to the quality of compilers.

Comparing LLMs to compilers is a take I often see, but I am not sure the comparison quite holds. The problem is that LLMs are inherently non-deterministic, so we always get a different output on the same prompt.

Maybe if LLMs are powerful enough it won't matter. I doubt it but we will see.

I think it's that when some code compiles to say assembler, the compiler doesn't prioritize readability and maintainability of the assembler code, since people are not expected to read and maintain it directly

Hand writing assembly produces more efficient and concise code, at the cost of developer time and required expertise. It was true for a long time, now not so much.

Lots of really silly people love to compare LLMs to compilers. "You don't look at the compiled code either" and "Back in the day, people also had negative reactions to compilers and wanted to keep writing assembly by hand" and other such nonsense.

I assume it's the idea that initially you wrote machine code, later assembly and then the "high level languages" started to gain traction.

And for each iteration there were scepticals...

But I am curious myself, what OP meant by this.

People keep saying that "models are just compilers, and I don't see you complsining about compilers". Which is such a bullshit argument