Comment by wasabi991011 2 days ago
No, that is a terrible analogy. High level languages are deterministic, fully specified, non-leaky abstractions. You can write C and know for a fact what you are instructing the computer to do. This is not true for LLMs.
There is still the important difference that you can reason with precision about a C implementation’s behavior, based on the C standard and the compiler and library documentation, or its source or machine code when needed. You can’t do that type of reasoning for LLMs, or only to a very limited extent.
Maybe, but buffer overflows would occur written in assembler written by experts as well. C is a fine portable assembler (could probably be better with the knowledge we have now) but programming is hard. My point: you can roughly expect an expert C programmer to produce as many bugs per unit of functionality as an expert assembly programmer.
I believe it to be likely that the C programmer would even writes the code faster and better because of the useful abstractions. An LLM will certainly write the code faster but it will contain more bugs (IME).
I was going to start this with "C's fine, but consider more broadly: one reason I dislike reactive programming is that the magic doesn't work reliably and the plumbing is harder to read than doing it all manually", but then I realised:
While one can in principle learn C as well as you say, in practice there's loads of cases of people getting surprised by undefined behaviour and all the famous classes of bug that C has.