In the late 1980s there was a time where we seriously weighed the option of hand assembly vs using compilers and hand assembly didn’t always lose. In the early 1990s I wanted to use C++ but the available compiler for IBM compatible PCs was too buggy to be of value.
By the mid 1990s that had changed, good C compilers were exceeding all but the highest effort human assembly code - if you didn’t like how it looked in assembly, you could much more easily “fix it” with a tweak to the C code instead of the assembly. I feel like we’re sort of getting there with AI agent LLMs today - if you don’t like what it provided, tell it why and let it try again - it’s usually faster and easier and gets a better product for the time invested to use the tool instead of calling it a slop box and doing it yourself.
In the late 1980s there was a time where we seriously weighed the option of hand assembly vs using compilers and hand assembly didn’t always lose. In the early 1990s I wanted to use C++ but the available compiler for IBM compatible PCs was too buggy to be of value.
By the mid 1990s that had changed, good C compilers were exceeding all but the highest effort human assembly code - if you didn’t like how it looked in assembly, you could much more easily “fix it” with a tweak to the C code instead of the assembly. I feel like we’re sort of getting there with AI agent LLMs today - if you don’t like what it provided, tell it why and let it try again - it’s usually faster and easier and gets a better product for the time invested to use the tool instead of calling it a slop box and doing it yourself.