Although I love the new era of LLM assisted reverse engineering, it really breaks my heart how much it negatively affect veterans in their area of passion.
Personally I will keep doing things I love. For instance, I didn't stop studying and playing chess when it was obvious that my career would be in engineering and I would never be a pro, or when computers became clearly much stronger than humans, which happened while I was already playing chess somewhat seriously.
I intend to keep rawdogging my stuff, especially the stuff I do for myself. It's more of a personal drama when it simply rug-pulls somebody's livelihood all of a sudden. This is not a new phenomenon, but it's happening at a remarkable rate right now. I wonder if this time around there will be enough people that they won't be dismissed as losers against progress.
Incidentally I've also been writing Z80 and x86 Asm for roughly as long, and saw the complaints about "compiler slop" (we didn't call it that) at the time. I could probably still beat one if I wanted to, but clearly "close enough is good enough" and there's so much useful software which would not have been created if compilers couldn't exist and everyone still had to write machine code using a hexpad.
Edit: got any counterarguments? It's not like I won't get a boost from using LLMs either.
You can outcode the compiler but ofc that's not a way to go with tens of thousands of instructions and so on. LLMs are just much faster in writing code, just like compilers are much faster at assembling all the functions.
And yes, in a roundabout way, this is Stallman's dream fulfilled to the tip with his printer driver ;)
Many of these people wanted a project to run and gatekeep the people "not worthy enough" to hack on it or to use it. That's changing now, everyone can prompt together a bunch of crap. Fun fact I think I've got like... probably more than ten people into C++ programming simply by helping them prompt AI on how to get started, then they've picked up actual skills along the way. Note, they weren't any kind of programmers before because code is scary, but with a much lower barrier of entry, many more people can do stuff. It's amazing to see.
In the modding community I'm most active in, counter-strike, I have seen someone come in and literally ask if there was money in it and if not what game would be best to make mods for to make some money.
Their lazy cloud-chasing is normal but my high-effort clout-chasing is lame and makes me a fraud?
We're social animals. We like doing cool stuff and getting social status for it. We like breaking new ground. We like going where nobody has gone before.
Is it irrational and emotional? Maybe. Being human is being irrational and emotional sometimes. It's fine.
I can see there are still lot to do in the generated code, but I also feel something went away, Now I start working on it, and realize I'm reminded I just have to dictate what I need and it will be generated
It's like I have to pay for the best gun in the game to win, otherwise I can't just progress. Then why am I playing the game for?
Are you implying that it does not?
If dynamite fishing were deployed on the scale the AI infra is, with VC capital and government backing, we'd run out of fish in a week.
The concept doesn't affect much, deployment of it affects a lot.