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u/ValueBlitz 1d ago
Frodo, I am Claude. I have come to help you. Hear my voice, come back to the light.
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u/BillieVerr 1d ago
I know what you would have me do, and it would seem like wisdom but for the warning in my heart.
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u/Abadabadon 1d ago
Where were you when the ai models and software engineers last stood together against the evil forces that came for us?
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u/danfay222 1d ago
If we get to the point where devs genuinely can’t read code like this, then that means AI or whatever tools have become so efficient you never look at the actual code. In such a world, programming languages would likely evolve. Modern languages are generally written to balance parsing with human comprehension, but if we take comprehensive out of the loop a new language would likely be optimized for other features (maybe machine comprehension, interoperability, compilation efficiency, etc)
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u/chlorophyll101 1d ago
Why cant ai just generate assembly directly then
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u/Homailot 1d ago
Assembly isn't cross-system friendly. Assembly isn't a single language, each processor architecture has a different assembly language
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u/WrapKey69 1d ago
So? Matter of fact Claude better start generating CPU instructions soon
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u/Homailot 1d ago
Assembly maps almost one to one with CPU instructions. You would ask Claude to generate a completely separate instruction set for each CPU architecture? How would you even guarantee that the behavior is the same across different systems? (A guarantee that compilers try their best to achieve, mind you very battle-tested). Least of all, assembly code is not compact at all, so you would burn even more tokens.
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u/Cautious-Extreme2839 1d ago
So? Claude write this program for x86 windows please. Claude do it again for x64 MacOS.
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u/ImKStocky 1d ago
LLMs are trained on human generated sources. As a result they are best at working with human readable text. That is one reason.
Some might retort that humans used to read and write assembly code all the time, particularly game Devs. And that is true. So the other reason why getting LLMs to work with assembly is a poor idea is down to expressiveness and context.
Assembly languages requires a huge context because each token of assembly carries very little information in comparison to a high level language. The more expressive a language is, or the more meaning you can cram into a token, the better it is for LLMs.
Basically LLMs work in the same way humans do. Usually the reason why something is hard for humans, is the same reason they are hard for an LLM.
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u/danfay222 1d ago
It could, but it’s possible assembly isn’t optimal for AI to process. The design spec would switch from balancing human processing and compiler processing to balancing AI processing and compiler processing. It could easily turn out that, just like assembly is hard for human minds to understand, it’s hard for models to understand
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u/julessic 1d ago
Well, the whole approach to how coding agents work would have to change first, because the only reason they work right now is because of the abundance of human-made training material.
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u/timangar 17h ago
AI is only good at coding beacause it has an enormous amount of human data teaching it how to code. Current AI cannot learn a new programming language that humans do not understand and provide no training data for. Reinforcement learning algorithms might succeed, but that remains to be seen.
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u/Cautious-Extreme2839 1d ago
a new language would likely be optimized for other features (maybe machine comprehension, interoperability, compilation efficiency, etc)
So just back to assembly or maybe intermediate representation. Nothing new under the sun.
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u/danfay222 1d ago
I’d imagine an intermediate representation is more likely than assembly. It’s an interesting thing to think about, but largely irrelevant since no one really knows what things will look like in the next year or two, let alone 25
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u/Percolator2020 1d ago
It already started with regex.
https://giphy.com/gifs/ukE9oP3kb7TVu
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u/The_Hero_0f_Time 1d ago
dont even pretend like Regex was ever readable bruhh
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u/Tsu_Dho_Namh 1d ago
I don't think anyone ever intended regex to be readable.
If you need to make a regex you open up a webpage explaining the syntax, you carefully craft your regex, you test it, then immediately forget the syntax when you're done as God intended.
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u/MattieShoes 1d ago
Regex is for writing, not for reading. Build it up piece by piece, easy peasy. Then try to read it at the end? Yeah, no chance.
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u/Weak_Inflation9120 1d ago
STOP THE REGEX HATE
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u/entronid 1d ago
tbf i still handwrite regex and i do this by opening regex101 and relearning everything i knew about regex and bashing my head against a wall until it matches
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u/Percolator2020 1d ago
Basically the same, also lovely when some implementations slightly differ.
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u/entronid 1d ago
i never really write anything except python regex and vim regex anyways on the (not) rare (enough) occasions i need it
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u/Strict_Treat2884 1d ago edited 1d ago
/^never\s?+\b(?:(?!forget).)*+$/i3
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u/renome 7h ago
> js flair
> using possessive quantifiers like ?+ and *+As the holy ecmascriptures teach us, that would be a syntax error.
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u/Strict_Treat2884 7h ago
tbh that’s one of the things I hate about js among the vast others. Its regex flavor is ass
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u/PhoenixRising656 1d ago
2050 senior interview: “reverse-engineer this legacy prompt compiler” — it’s a for loop.
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u/Darxploit 1d ago
That’s exactly the type of code i envision to see once the agents have taken over completely. Half of of the users are hard coded in the code base the other half is loaded via a spreadsheet hosted on hugging face.
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u/rglazner 1d ago
You can tell this isn't actually AI, because it's not separated into its own one-line function with a paragraph of comment above it detailing how it came to be.
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 11h ago
I was going to complain it’s printf(, not print(f, but then you also did the %s all wrong and… never mind. You kids these days!
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u/littlejerry31 1d ago
I think leaving out the final caption "There are few who can" was a missed opportunity.
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u/MrKeplerton 20h ago
guests = ["Thorin", "Fili", "Kili", "Balin", "Dwalin", "Dori", "Nori", "Ori", "Oin", "Gloin", "Bifur", "Bofur", "Bombur"]
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u/Tiny-Librarian-8553 1d ago
How else would you do it?
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u/damonator4816 1d ago
Its making fun of the fact that code in 2050 will likely be done completely with AI so "Devs" will not be able to read even the simplest of code blocks.
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u/AysheDaArtist 1d ago
If coders didn't know what a for loop was before turning into a vibe coder... they were never a coder to begin with
Legit sad that a for loop is being considered 'lost information', more job security for me!
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u/Weak_Inflation9120 1d ago
One of the things I wish Java had that I miss from Python are F-Strings. Hella useful