We are moving to AI and stopped writing code / scratching our heads, and you're here writing a web server in assembly. Humbling.
Who's "we"? I have too much self-respect to turn in crappy clanker-generated code rather than doing a good job myself.
Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
211–220 of 246 posts
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just art though. It's human thinking and problem solving and learning that is dying.
I have a (relatively well informed) view that people who aledge that "if you used an llm you did no thinking or problem solving" have never in fact used an a llm to generate anything particular complex. You do indeed need to do quite a bit of thinking and problem solving, to build things with an llm. If you disagree, repeat this project, so you can share with us how little thinking it required.
Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better.
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience people that did not hand code enough imagine that the hard part is coding, and not clearly defining all the possible edge cases and use cases. So, in my view, more people will (or should) understand now what is hard when building complex things, if they pass the stage of "I have a nice POC that works for this one case".
I don’t know. The edge cases become very clear when coding, because there are explicit and precise guarantees of how the code will behave that you can reason about (or when there aren’t, you know that you are in trouble and code defensively around it, and you can reason about that defensive code), which isn’t the case when vibe coding. When coding, you can prove the code correct in your head, and the edge cases are r…
Completely agree. My point is that they will start realising it not when vibe coding (as you say, nobody will ask them for clear specifications) but as soon as they will try to use it for more than one happy path demo. Then they will "patch" one case and break another and so on. And then they will probably complain LLM-s are crap at coding, same way some lazy product manager complained before when asked questions that they did not think about ...
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know. The edge cases become very clear when coding, because there are explicit and precise guarantees of how the code will behave that you can reason about (or when there aren’t, you know that you are in trouble and code defensively around it, and you can reason about that defensive code), which isn’t the case when vibe coding. When coding, you can prove the code correct in your head, and the edge cases are r…
Completely agree. My point is that they will start realising it not when vibe coding (as you say, nobody will ask them for clear specifications) but as soon as they will try to use it for more than one happy path demo. Then they will "patch" one case and break another and so on. And then they will probably complain LLM-s are crap at coding, same way some lazy product manager complained before when asked questions tha…
I see. Some people have the opinion that the things that are hard about hand-coding remain essentially the same when LLM-coding. They argue that this ensures their employment despite the shift from hand-coding to LLM-coding, and that the necessary expertise and diligence (e.g. appropriate architecture and test coverage) remains the same, and in consequence quality doesn’t suffer. I thought that you were arguing in that direction.
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#215Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this. Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?" I mourn the death of a human artform.
> I mourn the death of a human artform.
The artform only dies if you let it. Even if your employer is so idiotically myopic as to forbid you to ever write your own code, you can still continue the art on your own time. I for one don't care how "good enough" any AI-lableled technology gets at writing code. I will continue to hone my craft until the day I either die, become too unwell to do it, or some other creative endeavor consumes all of my personal time.
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#216[dead]
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote it for MacOS because I don't have a Linux machine right now :( Once I get one up and running again, I'll probably work on porting this. As for why it wouldn't run on Linux, there are some pretty big differences in the actual assembly. One pretty superficial difference is calling conventions -- MacOS uses the x16 register for syscall numbers, Linux uses x8. Calling the kernel in Mac uses "svc #0x80", in Linux…
Is it not possible to maintain a single codebase for both OS with appropriate .ifdef commands?
It would be possible, but impractical for where this project is now. In retrospect, I could have written it with more portability from the start, but since it was just a personal learning project I didn’t think too hard about it.
Aside from syscall numbers all being different (which would just require changing the consts in defs.S), syscall numbers are stored in the x16 register on MacOS vs x8 on Linux, and the kernel is called with svc #0x80 on MacOS vs svc #0 on Linux.
The bigger issue at this point is MacOS-specific syscalls. proc_info() doesn’t exist on Linux, so that would need to be rewritten. The sigaction struct also has different members (Linux doesn’t have sa_tramp), as well as every other struct having different offsets and sizes. getdirentries64() also doesn’t exist on Linux, it has getdents64() which is called differently and has different output as well I believe, so directory.S would need to be reworked too.
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#218Ten years ago, I would have kowtowed to someone elite enough to build something like this. Today, I just think, "how long would LLMs have taken to write this?" I mourn the death of a human artform.
It's far more exciting than sad. Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way. Look to the positive instead of lamenting something that never would have happened. It's unbelievably exciting that you can now program a computer virtually without the limitation of your ability to hand code it.
> Got an idea that you'd need assembly language for - now you can do it instead of..... never doing it because it would have been impossible for you in any practical way
If you are having an LLM generate the assembly language for you, that is not even remotely close to writing the assembly language yourself.
I don't find it exciting even in the slightest. I can think of nothing more boring and unsatisfying than having an LLM generate all of your code for you.
I mean, I understand why some think this could be exciting from a "I can get something done fast because the LLM generates it for me" standpoint -- because their excitement stems from something getting done at all instead of just sitting in the pool of ideas forever. However, you will never know the code generated by an LLM like you know the code you wrote yourself. Also you will never gain the same satisfaction of finishing a project where the code was written by an LLM that you gain from finishing a project where you wrote the code yourself.
If you are a person that doesn't care about coding or doesn't like to code at all, I could totally see why you'd find this exciting - to you it's all about avoiding work you don't care for or want to do yourself anyway. Also, a high percentage of people who do love coding have zero interest in writing assembly language, so if they were required to write some for a project, I could also see them being happy with having an LLM generate that part of the project for them.
However, I think for people who genuinely love to write code, the situation is the opposite of what you said -- it is far more sad than it is exciting. In fact, for many of them it has already reached the point of depressing for many reasons. I don't think it is primarily because the LLMs have gotten significantly better at generating code (which they have). I think some of the bigger reasons are that so many people who now pay people to produce code have:
1) got a very short-sighted and "rose-colored-glasses" view of what LLM-produced code will do for their company.
and
In the long run I think most (if not close to all) of those businesses are going to be sorry if they over-indulge in replacing human-produced code with LLM-produced code. I think the ones who lean too heavy on the LLM side are going to eventually collapse into a heap of unmanagable dumpster-fire code that they can't understand nor maintain. A whole new world of incidental complexity will consume every project, and in the long run it will just eat them alive (figuratively speaking, of course :-D ).
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the author wants to learn? Is learning just out of style now? I'd be doing the same kind of thing if I had more free time.
So go learn, and stop harassing others who are okay with using an LLM for some tasks.
You're the only person harassing anyone here; someone wanted to show off a handwritten project they did to learn a thing, and you came in with unsolicited LLM crap.
Re: Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't diminish the art form though. If anything, I value these kinds of hand written projects even more now that so many people are pulled in by AI doing their projects for them in a fraction of the time and effort. I love doing these kinds of projects, and I love writing assembly, but I must admit that the temptation of just copy pasting generated code is big sometimes, because it's _right there_. In this conte…
I think the parent's point is: a couple of years ago handwriting was the only option. You'd see a post like this and know it was something special. With LLMs, we can't tell anymore if something is a labor of love with hundreds of hours of work behind it, or half a dozen prompts to Claude Code.
Oh yeah I totally get that, and I feel the same, but the author of this project specifically says that it's hand written (first paragraph of the readme in the repo).