> In the AI age, understanding these concepts becomes more important, not less—they are what separate those who merely prompt from those who truly engineer.

But doesn't that sound like cope? It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development.

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yuye 11 hours ago | parent [-]

>It's like an old ASM programmer telling himself that his obscure assembly knowledge will surely still give him great advantages as he is forced to switch to React.js development.

The engineers that are truly skilled in writing pure assembly wouldn't be forced to switch to React. The existence of higher level languages doesn't mean lower level languages are useless.

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cubefox 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm pretty sure that nowadays much less assembly is written than a few decades ago. Even video games used to be written in assembly. So the demand for assembly programmers went down, and the skill became less useful, unless the supply went down by the same amount.

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yuye 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You're right, but that doesn't mean those assembly programmers are suddenly forced to write React.

Being an expert at assembly probably means you're an expert in low level programming. We still have a need for those people, because they'll probably also be able to write C/C++/Rust/Zig/etc very competently.

I consider myself pretty competent in C(And C++ to some degree), and I have a pretty good understanding of how computers work on a lower level, but if you ask me to write React UI components, I probably wouldn't fare well. I understand Javascript/Typescript, sure, but I'm just not familiar with the best practices of modern day frontend engineering.

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cubefox 9 hours ago | parent [-]

That's the thing with LLMs though. Assembly developers can switch to Rust or something like that. But LLMs probably write C or Go approximately as competently as they write Javascript. There is no commonly used language one could switch to which isn't automated yet.

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yuye 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That I disagree with, though. First of all, Go is a garbage collected language, so can't be compared to C.

C is a language that is able to target basically every platform under the sun. It's versatile: User-space applications, kernel modules, and embedded firmware applications with an RTOS or even running on bare metal.

LLMs can produce basic C code, but (still) struggle with more specialized tasks.

They can be incredibly useful for skimming through long datasheet PDFs, but it's still up to the engineer to actually make sure the code it produces is actually good.

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cubefox 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> LLMs can produce basic C code, but (still) struggle with more specialized tasks.

And for how many more months will this state last?

	▲	yuye 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who knows? I'm an engineer, not a psychic.