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Apparently it's not obvious to everyone, but if you can't write code, you can't review it. I do know people, and companies, that says: "So what, we ask Claude to write the code, Codex will then do the review". The thing that then strikes me as odd is that they still ask for the code in Python, Java, or some other high level language.... Why? Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much. They still want to be able to read the code. So they need developers that can read, debug and reason about the code, yet they don't want to give them the training that's required to do this?
They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.

I'm as hateful of LLMs hollowing out the job market as the next guy, but the reality is the frontier LLMs are really good at writing anything that's been done and documented on the Internet a million times and unfortunately most of what software devs have been doing the last couple decades is shitting out cookie cutter CRUD apps.

I have my doubts about whether the state of the industry is going to advance as long as we're having LLMs do all the creation, but that's another diatribe.

Claude is perfectly capable of writing assembly. Here's a working (basic) Prolog interpreter that Claude Fable 5 wrote in WebAssembly in 61 minutes for $16.75 in token costs: https://github.com/emk/fable-wasm-prolog/blob/main/prolog.wa...

WebAssembly is slightly easier than real assembly, but here Fable used WASM GC extensions, which are poorly documented and not yet super common.

Fable didn't even need to debug it; I believe essentially all the assembly worked correctly on the first try.

I have feelings about this, but I'm not pretending it isn't real.

I have a personal game framework that I have LLMs write games in, which is in AssemblyScript. AssemblyScript is certainly closer to TypeScript than it is to WebAssembly, but it's still this thing where the host shares some big chunk of memory with the script and you pick some memory locations to read and write as your means of exposing APIs, and there's not a lot of training data on games written in AssemblyScript and even less in my game framework specifically (none) - and the LLM does an excellent job.
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WebAssembly has as much to do with assembly as JavaScript has with Java. I highly doubt the "slightly easier" and my attempts with LLM's and assembly so far were largely disappointing, but I also think there is no compelling reason this has to be the case.
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The guys with unlimited Fable/Mythos access are for some reason incapable of producing a flawless Claude Code app built entirely in native assemblies.
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There’s a very real dichotomy at play here. Position 0: humans depend upon AI. Position 1: AIs depend upon humans.

At first blush, it seems achingly obvious that position 1 is true, whilst position 0 is a false play by con artists.

Well, at first blush I agree! But first blushes are notorious for being famous last words (blushes).

You see, we always knew that the tool shapes the hand. That is, as we use computational (discrete) devices, we ourselves become more computational, discrete.

But what we did not anticipate is that the tool would fool others as the ACTUAL HAND. I am so fooled. Daily.

My friends. Does technique encompass being? Answer me this!

Just interesting to see Claude’s hourly rate is around $17.

Much cheaper than a human software engineer. But comparable to the wages for some human workers.

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> Fable didn't even need to debug it; I believe essentially all the assembly worked correctly on the first try.

so you don't know if it works properly or not

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Yeah I had it remake my favorite TI-89 graphing calculator game in Python and it one shotted it perfectly.
Which effort setting did you run this with?
> They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.

I suspect that despite its translation abilities, this is true, but I'd like to see it do things in languages that are more or less appropriate for tasks to see how much the training corpus matters vs. its ability to translate. Assembly is a bit of an extreme example because you're either writing it as close to C as possible (C is essentially portable assembly) or you're writing complex, unreviewable code that happens to work. And who know if it's been trained on register allocation, or resorts to doing everything on the stack because it works.

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LLMs are perfectly capable of translating between programming languages at this point. The main bottleneck for them is logic, not language.
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What's there to advance to?

Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.

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couldn’t the frontier labs simply compile their existing source code training data and have an assembly corpus to train on?
It's still possible to make CRUD apps in assembly with an AI agent but it would be a research project.
By "research project" you you mean by people who understand assembly? Because then we're back to where we started.
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LLMs are designed to imitate humans not compilers. Hardly anyone is capable of writing modern optimized Assembly code by hand outside of a few snippets here and there (not in a reasonable amount of time at least)
>They don't have Claude write assembly because there is no training corpus on people making CRUD apps in assembly.

I'm disputing this. You can have a training corpus in assembly as big as any other language: just feed the compiled result(in assembly) of the CRUD apps to the LLMs.

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