Programming in Assembly Is Brutal, Beautiful, and Maybe Even a Path to Better AI

Whether your chip is running a vintage computer game or the latest DeepSeek model, it'll reward you for speaking its native language. But if you took a look beneath the pixels--the rickety rides, the crowds of hungry, thirsty, barfing people (and the janitors mopping in their wake)--deep down at the level of the code, you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game's sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly. Because if/when the machines take over, we should at least speak their language. Certain programming languages, like Python or Go or C++, are called "high-level" because they work sort of like human language, written in commands and idioms that might fit in at a poetry slam.