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Why write code in 2026

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171–180 of 321 posts

Re: Why write code in 2026

#171

Post by satvikpendem »

mrweasel wrote: post #73

Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…

> Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much

No, people do advocate for this. It may simply not be as portable however as something that is high level able to be compiled to assembly for many machines.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#172

Post by ccoffey1 »

"Instead, we’re switching to this wrong-headed mindset that coding agents are like compilers. That mindset gives us permission to ship terribly written code. Agents aren’t compilers - they’re more like freshly onboarded interns."

I feel this statement these days during code reviews. I know some amazing engineers whose output lately just isn't the same.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#173

Post by weakfish »

TrackerFF wrote: post #91

If we look at the progress made from ChatGPT 3.5 (Nov 2022) and up to today...shoot, I'm really starting to wonder if we'll even be reviewing code in 4 years. And I'm not saying this as some sort of AI maximalist. If progress keeps up, I seriously doubt software engineering and development will, as we know it today, will be a thing in the next 5-10 years. Maybe humans will be left with designing the UI, but everythin…

You’re assuming that progress will continue at the same rate (it’s plateaud a bit as far as I can tell, I can look for sources tomorrow but am on phone now :))

& I think it’s fairly demonstrated that the industry isn’t profitable for training ever increasingly huge models, which get exponentially more expensive each iteration

Re: Why write code in 2026

#175

Post by zx8080 »

mrweasel wrote: post #73

Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don…

> Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it.

Why review it at all? The trend is to vibe code everything with agent harnesses and tokenmaxxxing.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#176

Post by fragmede »

gnabgib wrote: post #149
LtWorf wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> C is essentially portable assembly Not really, assembly shows you what the machine instructions actually are. In C you have loops, functions structs. All things that make no sense in assembly.

Loops (conditional JMPS - JE/JNE/JZ/JNZ/JB/JNB.. and a dozen others) and functions (CALL, RET) exist in assembly. Goto is there too (all JMPs). C makes assembly sense.

Oh that's an interesting thought. Goto's are considered harmful, because holy hell as a human trying to understand and reason about code, the spaghettifcation if someone else used gotos all over the place and I have to reconstruct their thought process just doesn't sound like fun. But if we're no longer writing code by hand (which, I gotta be honest, I'm using AI to write a lot of code for me these days), then does that still matter? If a human isn't going to have to understand the code, can we get more performance out of existing systems by considering goto's useful?

Re: Why write code in 2026

#177

Post by supriyo-biswas »

prymitive wrote: post #24

I need to write code because otherwise LLMs will write too much code, it’s only when you fully understand the problem you can generalise it enough to not end up with 10k lines and 5 abstraction layers for “hello world”. LLMs are token predictors, so all solutions are you tokens, the more problems to solve == the more tokens (code) to output.

So much this, the other day I wanted to set up a project running in K8s similar to our other modules at work, and it he thing ended up writing unit tests for a hello world implementation.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#178

Post by dehrmann »

fragmede wrote: post #176
gnabgib wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Loops (conditional JMPS - JE/JNE/JZ/JNZ/JB/JNB.. and a dozen others) and functions (CALL, RET) exist in assembly. Goto is there too (all JMPs). C makes assembly sense.

Oh that's an interesting thought. Goto's are considered harmful, because holy hell as a human trying to understand and reason about code, the spaghettifcation if someone else used gotos all over the place and I have to reconstruct their thought process just doesn't sound like fun. But if we're no longer writing code by hand (which, I gotta be honest, I'm using AI to write a lot of code for me these days), then does t…

Compilers only really use them for things like break and the end if blocks. There isn't much to gain by being able to execute anything arbitrarily, and then go...where? There might be places here and there within a function where compilers already take advantage of it, but I doubt it's useful in the way you think.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#179

Post by jimbokun »

ekidd wrote: post #117
ryandvm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly. I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out…

Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…

Just interesting to see Claude’s hourly rate is around $17.

Much cheaper than a human software engineer. But comparable to the wages for some human workers.

Re: Why write code in 2026

#180

Post by byzantinegene »

dude250711 wrote: post #129
ekidd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa... WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common. Fable didn't even need to debug it;…

The guys with unlimited Fable/Mythos access are for some reason incapable of producing a flawless Claude Code app built entirely in native assemblies.

they use React to render their TUI :)
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