Did you actually learn C? Be thankful nothing like this existed in 1997.

A machine generating code you don't understand is not the way to learn a programming language. It's a way to create software without programming.

These tools can be used as learning assistants, but the vast majority of people don't use them as such. This will lead to a collective degradation of knowledge and skills, and the proliferation of shoddily built software with more issues than anyone relying on these tools will know how to fix. At least people who can actually program will be in demand to fix this mess for years to come.

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metaltyphoon 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't understand how OP thinks that being oblivious how anything work underneath is a good thing. There is a threshold of abstraction to which you must know how it works to effectively fix it when it breaks.

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hdgvhicv 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I’m vaguely aware that transistors are like electronic switches and if I serve my memory I could build and and/or/not gate

I have no idea how an i386 works, let alone a modern cpu. Sure there are registers and different levels of cache before you get to memory.

My lack of knowledge of all this doesn’t prevent me from creating useful programs using higher abstraction layers like c.

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jedberg 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can be a super productive Python coder without any clue how assembly works. Vibe coding is just one more level of abstraction.

Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python and Golang programmers for things that need to be more efficient than what was vibe coded.

But do you really need your $whatever to be super efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?

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kshri24 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One is deterministic the other is not. I leave it to you to determine which is which in this scenario.

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afro88 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Humans writing code are also non deterministic. When you vibe code you're basically a product owner / manager. Vibe coding isn't a higher level programming language, it's an abstraction over a software engineer / engineering team.

	▲	kshri24 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Humans writing code are also non deterministic That's not what determinism means though. A human coding something, irrespective of whether the code is right or wrong, is deterministic. We have a well defined cause and effect pathway. If I write bad code, I will have a bug - deterministic. If I write good code, my code compiles - still deterministic. If the coder is sick, he can't write code - deterministic again. You can determine the cause from the effect. Every behavior in the physical World has a cause and effect chain. On the other hand, you cannot determine why a LLM hallucinated. There is no way to retrace the path taken from input parameters to generated output. At least as of now. Maybe it will change in the future where we have tools that can retrace the path taken.

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jfreds 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

This is true. What are the implications of that?

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pqtyw 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps there is no need to actually understand assembly, but if you don't understand certain basic concepts actually deploying any software you wrote to production would be a lottery with some rather poor prizes. Regardless of how "productive" you were.

	▲	ben_w 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Somebody needs to understand, to the standard of "well enough". The investors who paid for the CEO who hired your project manager to hire you to figure that out, didn't. I think in this analogy, vibe coders are project managers, who may indeed still benefit from understanding computers, but when they don't the odds aren't anywhere near as poor as a lottery. Ignorance still blows up in people's faces. I'd say the analogy here with humans would be a stereotypical PHB who can't tell what support the dev needs to do their job and then puts them on a PIP the moment any unclear requirement blows up in anyone's face.

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neilwilson 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s what a C compiler does when generating a binary.

There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable.

In the early days of g++, there was no guarantee the object code worked as intended. But it was fun working that out and filing the bug reports.

This new tool is just a different sort of transpiler and optimiser.

Treat it as such.

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wizzwizz4 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable.

No, there wasn't: you could just run the shell script, or (a bit later) the makefile. But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.

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jstummbillig 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.

This is trivially true. The constraint for anything you do in your life is time it takes to know something.

So the far more interesting question is: At what level do you want to solve problems – and is it likely that you need knowledge of as, ld and ar over anything else, that you could learn instead?

	▲	wizzwizz4 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Knowledge of as, ld, ar, cc, etc is only needed when setting up (or modifying) your build toolchain, and in practice you can just copy-paste the build script from some other, similar project. Knowledge of these tools has never been needed.

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imiric 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you don't see a difference between a compiler and a probabilistic token generator, I don't know what to tell you.

And, yes, I'm aware that most compilers are not entirely deterministic either, but LLMs are inherently nondeterministic. And I'm also aware that you can tweak LLMs to be more deterministic, but in practice they're never deployed like that.

Besides, creating software via natural language is an entirely different exercise than using a structured language purposely built for that.

We're talking about two entirely different ways of creating software, and any comparison between them is completely absurd.

	▲	anthk 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People negating down your comment are just "engineers" doomed to fail sooner or later. Meanwhile, 9front users have read at least the plan9 intro and know about nm, 1-9c, 1-9l and the like. Wibe coders will be put on their place sooner or later. It´s just a matter of time.

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anthk 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Competent C programmers know about nm, as, ld and a bunch of other binary sections in order to understand issues and proper debugging.

Everyone else are deluding themselves. Even the 9front intro requieres you to at least know the basics of nm and friends.

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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AndrewKemendo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It would’ve been nice to have a system that I could just ask questions to teach me how it works instead of having to pour through the few books that existed on C that was actually accessible to a teenager learning on their own

Going to arcane websites, forum full of neckbeards to expect you to already understand everything isn’t exactly a great way to learn

The early Internet was unbelievably hostile to people trying to learn genuinely

	▲	hrldcpr 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		*pore through (not a judgment, just mentioning in case the distinction is interesting to anyone)
	▲	rabf 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I had the books (from the library) but never managed to get a compiler for many years! Was quite confusing trying to understand all the unix references when my only experience with a computer was the Atari ST.

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Workaccount2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's just another layer.

Assembly programmers from years gone by would likley be equally dismissive of the self-aggrandizing code block stitchers of today.

(on topic, RCT was coded entirely in assembly, quite the achievement)