One of the reasons why I have been thinking and writing this topic is because there is indeed a malaise among the team, which is along the lines of "AI agents are blowing up coding everywhere, what place does a compiler have in this brave new world?" If compilers truly are pointless, then I would like to update on this and save people time and grief!
But I also don't think compilers are pointless. In this post, which looks at the maximalist AI situation, the compiler resurrects itself as the verifier: the two types of systems do very similar things! You can also defend compilers on more banal grounds: not everyone has a ton of kernel engineers to hand optimize your kernels; token efficient ways of getting good baselines is useful; there's more to ML than transformer models and compiler leverage is really useful there. There's also a historical point which is that torch.compile... by all objective metrics, has really been quite successful!
I do agree it's hard to tell the future. These days, I ask myself, "Do I think this is likely to happen in six months." I don't think compilers die in six months. Ask me again in six months :)
But I also don't think compilers are pointless. In this post, which looks at the maximalist AI situation, the compiler resurrects itself as the verifier: the two types of systems do very similar things! You can also defend compilers on more banal grounds: not everyone has a ton of kernel engineers to hand optimize your kernels; token efficient ways of getting good baselines is useful; there's more to ML than transformer models and compiler leverage is really useful there. There's also a historical point which is that torch.compile... by all objective metrics, has really been quite successful!
I do agree it's hard to tell the future. These days, I ask myself, "Do I think this is likely to happen in six months." I don't think compilers die in six months. Ask me again in six months :)