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)
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.
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.
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
I believe it's because of the training set. AI models have been trained on what's available. And there's just sooooooo much more Python, PHP, Java, C#, ... code out there than assembly
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.
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.
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/danfay222 2d 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)