WHY “SKIP THE CODE, SHIP THE BINARY” IS A CATEGORY ERROR

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

Elon Musk predicts that by 2026, AI will directly generate executable binaries, making programming languages and compilers obsolete. However, this is a "category error," since deterministic compilers rigorously transform and optimize code in milliseconds, unlike probabilistic LLMs, which offer no correctness guarantees. Replacing this proven process would be expensive, energy-intensive, and eliminate benefits of source code like debugging, version control, and human readability.