Musk's Macrohard is as silly as it sounds

Reading through my tech newsfeed elicits a variety of reactions. Sometimes it's a flicker of interest. Or bemusement. Lately it's been a mixture of weariness and disbelief.

Apparently, Elon Musk thinks that A.I automatically churning out code is inefficient; it should bypass that bullshit. It should automatically compile binaries and ship the finished software. And to do that, he's creating companies like Macrohard. (Yes, that was a juvenile jab at Microsoft which he doubled down on. Sure inspires confidence, doesn't it?)

Of course, this would theoretically remove the need for coders at multiple levels of the stack, but I'm not opposed to that if it truly was a win for tech. Alas...

Why it's a bad idea

Did I say bad? It's a laughably inept concept, even by the standards of science fiction fantasies. If ideas were ships, this one wouldn't even be the Titanic. It would be a sailboat made from spaghetti.

A sailboat made from spaghetti.

Programming code is the bridge between highly ambiguous human language (that only humans - and even then, not all humans - understand) and machine binaries (that only computers understand).

That bridge is looking remarkably tenuous at the moment. Right now LLMs churn out code, trained on millions of lines of potentially imperfect code previously written by human beings. And these imperfections might not even be syntax errors. They might be inefficiencies, logic traps and ambiguities.

The reason why software development takes time is not due to the time it takes to compile code to binary. It's the time producing said code to begin with, and ensuring that it works the way it's supposed to work, without nasty surprises. Going straight to binary does not remove that necessity. Especially when it's potentially end users who deliver the specs straight to the machine. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

This is not innovation

Removing vital parts of a system in order to be "efficient" isn't innovation. Any idiot can remove a wheel from a car because the car can still move on three wheels.

As it is, LLMs already hallucinate in both English and code. Expecting them not to hallucinate in binary is, to put it gently, optimistic. A hallucination in code could still be caught by a compiler. A hallucination right in binary? Good luck, chum.

You know what kind of failures software developers worldwide fear the most? Not the loud ones that announce themselves. The silent ones. The ones that you catch only when it's too late. And this latest idea practically screams "too late".

We prefer loud and visible
failures.

Removing the part that is actually human readable, also removes human oversight. Sure, you may think that you're democratizing tech. But this just means that the only people who would be talking to A.I, would be non-technical users. Users who sometimes even have trouble talking to fellow human beings, would be expected to correct the mistakes of machines.

In other words, Elon Musk is solving the wrong problem. The problem isn't that code needs to be compiled. The problem is that laypersons need to communicate their needs better, and A.I needs to actually understand code, as opposed to just regurgitating it from millions of processed lines of text.

I've had to revise my opinion of Elon Musk, yet again

Before, I thought he was a genius with the temperament of a teenager.

Then I thought he was a bit of a twat.

Now I see that he's either masterfully trolled the tech world, or he's as ignorant as this idea suggests. This is akin to having a house broken into, and instead of changing the locks on the doors, simply covering the keyhole with duct tape.

exit status 1,
T___T