Given how few programmers very seriously write lots of assembly, it's kind of astonishing how good LLMs are at working with assembly. They can compile and decompile all on their own with apparently very little effort.

I suspect (with zero proof or understanding) that this has something to do with how well C maps to assembly. It's not a stretch to say the model's vector space maps this chunk of assembly with that line of C. And we all know how much C code exists online.

It's relatively recent, I feel. Claude used to really struggle with writing asm not that long ago. But the last 6 months or so it's done great.

It's also far better than me (as someone who has done assembler since the Commodore 64) at using gdb to debug it, despite being effectively stuck using it in batch mode (which I didn't even knew existed). Watching it write elaborate scripts to dig into a code generation bug in my compiler is something.

I feel like the problem used to be that it'd struggle with the ambiguity of flow that is much more apparent in a high level language. But clearly that's not a problem any more.