Engineering decisions and the resulting output.

We've known for decades that machine-translated code is garbage, and should only be done as a last resort.

Your HN account is too new for me to be sure whether you're being sarcastic or not. Perhaps you know, or perhaps you don't, that all code is machine-translated, even assembly language. None of it is perfect, but it's not garbage. Today's AI merely provides a new level. It's a weird, non-deterministic level, but hiring an employee to write code for you is similarly non-deterministic.

	▲	fdsajfkldsfklds 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, and that's why Mel was a true programmer! Seriously though, that's an overly-pedantic definition of a compiler. Broadly speaking, languages compile in a direction of decreasing abstraction. Crossing from one high-level abstraction to another is just asking for trouble, especially in this case where the target language makes very specific performance promises as long as certain abstractions are maintained.