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?
Sure, we could reuse some basic building blocks like implementations of the tcp/ip protocol, http, sockets etc but server frameworks like fastapi are just human friendly abstractions over all that.
also you still need to maintain it. When something breaks in production you need to understand what the code does.
the real bottleneck with AI coding isnt the language its context. The model needs to understand your conventions, patterns, business logic. That gets exponentially worse with lower level languages not better.
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).
https://x.com/davepl1968/status/2044482592620351955
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.
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.
Any 'public' (rate limited) web API (using CURL) from current AI inferences services?