Lots of really silly people love to compare LLMs to compilers. "You don't look at the compiled code either" and "Back in the day, people also had negative reactions to compilers and wanted to keep writing assembly by hand" and other such nonsense.

Indeed, the compiler does not have to ingest its own output, figure it out, and insert modifications in the middle. Source code is the medium that LLMs work in.

They are ignorant about the elephant in the room. The input language of a compiler is a formally-specified grammar with well-defined semantics for each operation. It generally abstracts the computation process over a von-Neumann machine, adding convenience features and bells and whistles. What "a=1" means in an HLL is, store that value in a particular storage location, so that it can be accessed later by the same name.

The slop machine reads lousy natural human language that can mean different things in different contexts. That lousy language is then statistically probed for the most likely output correspondence, producing shit that needs to be externally verified.