Why don't we just ask AI to write assembler?

Layers of abstraction remain effective and valuable. Why reinvent state management, for example, with each application?

Runtime also matters; you can’t run assembly on the web.

Security mechanisms can also preclude assembly.

Etc.

FWIW, your question stopped short before the bottom turtle in the stack. Below assembly is machine code. So your question could rather be, why not emit machine code. Assembly is made for humans because we can understand it, but machine code is not really tractable for humans to engage with in a meaningful way.

Two reasons.

First reason, LLMs are modeled from what humans have been doing, and the have been writing software that way recently so it's easier to mimick that to get straight to results. This reason might fade away in the future.

Second reason, something related to impedance (mis)match, a signal processing notion (when the interface between two media is not well-suited, it is difficult to have a signal pass through).

Going through intermediate levels makes a structured workflow where each steps follows the previous one "cheaply". On the contrary, straight generating something many layers away requires juggling with all the levels at once, hence more costly. So "cheaply" above both means "better use of a LLM context" but also use regular tools where they are good instead of paying the high price (hardware+computation+environment) of doing it via LLM.

Interestingly, AIs are used to generate sample-level audio and some video, which may look like it contradicts the point. Still they are costly (especially video).

I wish I could test that and mass port from c++ to plain and simple C.

Any 'public' (rate limited) web API (using CURL) from current AI inferences services?

Because there’s not enough learning material? Like most of the code LLMs have stolen for training is highlevel code, not assembly

Dave Plummer claims to have successfully generated working executable PE binaries using ChatGPT.

https://x.com/davepl1968/status/2044482592620351955

AI doesn't actually know anything, just predicts, and as such most training data is in high level languages.

Programming languages are not just for ergonomics. They are valuable abstractions that help us reason. And they also help LLMs reason in the same manner.

Ai are are not smart enough for that, its not real ai neither to do it

[flagged]

IF you don't check the code, you can't navigate correctly the UI. The AI is non-deterministic, and you can never be sure, that it will produce the same quality and use the same approach everytime. Even, with all the rules, lessons learned, documentation, a code review afterwards will find something. With that in mind, in order to write an assembler program, you need someone to teach the model how to do it. And in order to teach it, you need to be able to read what's generated ;)

That would be quite expensive in terms of time and token use. It would need to be tested, and you’d have so many repetitive tests you might as well encode the behavior they expect in generators of blocks of assembly, i.e. higher level languages and compilers.

[dead]

> If we generate so much code using AI that no one is really looking or reading the code anymore, just verifying end functionality, we can really just skip all that and go straight to assembler, no?

We could also just autogenerate the content of our websites, emails, contracts.

And we do, resulting in mountains of slop, varying from soulless to wildly incorrect.

Code is a precise way to describe intent. Using LLMs make up some of the intent results in the author not knowing what the precise functionality of the resulting code is.

The companies selling LLM services present this as magic which will magically do what the author wants it to do, without even the author themselves knowing or defining it.

In reality it is simply ignorance and lies.

Sorry we can’t wishful think good working software into existence.

Too many tokens, and high-level languages have better semantics, making them more suitable for reasoning.