i’m kinda surprised LLMs are now capable of generating somewhat working assembly code

We’re living in a golden age of vibe-coded fairy-gifts, marvels appear hourly which are not the product of any human mind. They may do more or less what’s promised, though may blow up in weird and random ways or have stupid bugs, inefficiencies or security holes that no thinking author would have signed off on. Eventually, like all fairy gold, they turn to straw: if they don’t fall apart under use, there’s no way to update or improve a dense blob of LLM-extruded code when specs or requirements change, so you just throw when away and implore the LLM fae to send a new one.

But – there’s always a “but” – before you get too excited, there’s a catch.

Both Frame and yserver were built using LLM bots.

I mean, yeah. Even X11’s own maintainers are sick of that mountain of spaghetti and are just keeping it on life support. Anything trying to replace X11 (besides XWayland) is effectively a throwaway project and shouldn’t be seriously used.

I was like y tho

Isene also has his own window manager, Tile; his own terminal emulator, Glass; and even his own shell, called Bare. He calls the whole stack CHasm — CHange to ASM. All the tools are standalone binaries, implemented in x86-64 assembly language, targeting Linux, with no external dependencies. To go with them, he also has a similarly compact suite of Rust-based tools as well, named Fe₂O₃.

Guy just wants to build his own software stack