an LLM can easily code it without errors

can't tell if sarcasm or not. Just in case it's not.. in that case why don't we all vibe everything in assembly? No need for abstractions anymore since that's a human concept. LLM can do it without errors, as you say, and we'll reap the benefits of speed!

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mdp2021 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> why don't we all vibe everything in assembly

I really loved this retort, but we have to reply: from that cone of perspective, it would be probably better to "vibecode" in C and not hope that the LLM does a better job than the compiler (for efficiency, not for absence of bugs as per the original). (Edit: for clarity: some compilers of low level languages are specialized in ASM optimization - the LLM will hardly beat them.)

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

Because it's not portable. The world we find ourselves in is at least x86 and ARM, and assembly for one isn't good for the other. LLVM has a hardware agnostic intermediate representation (IR) that one could use though.

	▲	Keyframe 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		you're not thinking vibe enough. Your prompts are now the program, that's your abstraction. Ideally, if it would work, LLM would be the one then producing each platform's output. Maybe even compiling from higher languages to gather some compiler optimization hints and then doing full salvo of asm. Ideally.

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slashdave 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except for some odd corner cases, it is very hard for a good engineer to beat compilers these days (they are very good now). Not to mention, tuning depends on the platform, and often the exact model of chip.

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Keyframe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

* it is very hard for a good engineer to beat compilers these days (they are very good now).*

I keep hearing this for the last 20 odd years, yet I see evidence to the contrary each and every day. It is hard and honest work though.

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zero-sharp 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

there were two lead developers from FFMPEG on Lex Fridman's youtube channel who talked about performance gain from assembly. They claimed the opposite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUo0UwZOaRw

	▲	slashdave 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, a corner case (streaming) and good developers working very hard. The original SSE (SIMD) extensions were actually written with this use case in mind. When they first came out, the compilers were awful. They've since caught up.