Community Radar.

“Elon Musk: "The next step is getting rid of “source code” entirely and just making an efficient binary directly with AI."”

my take: it's true that the ratio of code written to code reviewed has shifted as engineers started to spend more time reviewing code than writing it. no surprise there. but we stopped writing assembly because compilers provide a "deterministic", reproducible translation. we can inspect the generated assembly when something goes wrong. ai generated binaries have neither property, i'd assume - if this is what he's talking about. so the mapping is stochastic, and the output isn't meaningfully inspectable, literal ai slop lol. so removing source code removes the only human readable layer, is this a feature or the future? maybe.. just maybe that's because source code isn't just compiler input but literally the medium for review, versioning, diffs, debugging, auditing, and so on. and those needs don't disappear because generation gets cheaper; if anything, they become more important when the generator is nondeterministic. tl;dr: if your english prompts become the durable artifact, then english effectively becomes your source code. and any precise specification defining real program behavior inevitably resembles a programming language. that’s precisely what programming languages are. on efficiency.. isn't the argument is also backwards? modern compilers like llvm perform decades of optimized transformations. a model emitting machine code directly would almost certainly be slower, less correct, and lose target portability (arm, x86, wasm, risc-v and so on). but who cares right? just one more datacenter bro. trust me. anyway we've seen similar predictions before with case tools, uml, no-code, 4gls.. the intermediate artifact never disappeared because that's where the meaning actually lives.