> The foundational knowledge is lost, meaning that even if we do look at the code, we won't understand it anyway.

but this is similar to a lot of other technical fields that have width and depth. People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler. People now can only design a part of a CPU, and not the entirety. Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.

Yet, we all trust these things.

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2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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ibeckermayer 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Trusting the output of an abstraction explicitly designed, engineered, and tested by other humans with an actual understanding of the layer beneath you is not comparable to trusting a non-deterministic, statistical next-word-predictor with no mind or ability to be morally responsible for what it produces.

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FartyMcFarter 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> People would not understand assembly any more and blindly trust the output of the compiler.

This was OK as long as you understood enough Assembly to debug it. Even though I haven't written much Assembly directly, I can still debug it when there are compiler bugs, which does ocasionally happen.

If you lose the ability to both write and debug code then things get much worse. If no one at a company can do that, then you truly are at the mercy of the LLMs.

As for hardware bugs, those are only possibly to identify (by excluding any other possibility) and work-around, since most engineers don't have the luxury of being able to change the hardware.

I'm wondering if some of us will become consultants to companies that lost the ability to handle code. When I was in university the going meme was that old COBOL programmers were making a lot of money in consulting jobs, maybe this will be the new version of that.

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jmusall 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

With the crucial difference that these processes deterministically return correct & working results (save for bugs which can be fixed and then stay fixed). Cannot be guaranteed for LLM output, no matter how much effort we put in.

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deathanatos 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end.

There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed. Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler (… and no, I don't work in a low level language), he understands chip fabrication end to end.

CS is not that wide, not yet. No, one cannot know every facet of the field, but one can know enough about the facets one is in contact with that they're not "here be dragons" on the map. All the way down to the hardware.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent [-]

> There are YouTube videos of a guy doing chip fabrication in his clean room shed

The fact this is "a guy", and probably there are very few people in the world who would be able to execute such a thing, probably should tell you how difficult that actually is. You're actually unintentionally making parent's point stronger, as obviously the production processes used for market products is much, much more complicated than what a guy in a shed does.

> Just as I understand the assembly output of my compiler

Fair enough, this is probably way more common than "person who understands the entire chip manufacturing process from beginning to end", but it's still something that less and less people know about, in a room of 100 average developers, probably few of them could realistically claim to understand all the assembly output of their compiler, if even they're familiar enough with that their language outputs assembly in the first place.

The range of skills in developers is enourmous, you have Klaus working as IT+web dev+database+admin in a tiny 2 person web shop, and on the other hand you have Anders who is a ML expert optimizing CUDA kernels, and everything in-between. That all (or even most) of them know the far end of what they currently know is wishful thinking really, Klaus doesn't need to know about what the NVCC compiler outputs, nor do Anders need to know about the specific constraints of mapping packaged products to order shipments, that's all fine.

	▲	pbronez 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And this is fine! This is the whole point of living in a civilization. Master your craft, get useful, trade with people who know other useful things, everyone is better off. You could just as easily point out that subsistence farmers exist. That’s great, but we still need industrial agriculture to feed everyone. No single human fully understands that domain either… even ignoring the chemistry, biology and meteorology, those farms use digitally controlled tools! That means all of computer science is embedded in farming. It’s great to pursue broad knowledge. It’s important to understand your dependencies and respect the abstractions you build on. It’s pure hubris to think an individual auteur can challenge a multi-billion person civilization.

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skydhash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Yet, we all trust these things.

Yes! Because of two words. Consistency and Reliability.

All the physics equations, we trust them not because they are pretty, but because they have been consistent with experiment. Simplified models of transistors are also consistent within a temperature range. Boolean Logic is also consistent, the Turing Machine is consistent,…, the electronics inside a chip is reliable. The instruction set is reliable, etc,…

> Chip manufacturing is so complicated that there's probably no single person who could understand the entire process, from end to end

I strongly doubt that. The actual theoretical knowledge is taught at school and you can take an iron and some electronic elements and build some 8bit computer. Modern chip manufacturing is a matter of scale. It’s cumbersome to design with logic gates, so we invented hardware design languages (just like it’s cumbersome to deal with opcodes) and they are reliable. And instead of PCB, we just use a silicium wafer.