Definitely sympathetic to their policy, but AI tooling and quality are changing quite fast. In a year I'd expect a modification of this as AI agents get better in virtually every possible way.
Wow.... I remember writing 8086 assembly on MASM and another assembler I've forgotten the name of, and then also doing inline ASM in Turbo C++
The segment thing and the convoluted different pointer math caused real gymnastics if you ever had data bigger than 64k... such as images.
I always thought of the segments as windows of 64k but moving between those windows, esp with the limited register set, required some real mental gymnastics.
There is some base level of intelligence any model needs to be useful, even in narrow tasks.
Could you teach a 5 year old to drive a car? A 10 year old? A 12 year old? To drive a car requires being able to read, to have judgement about ice or rainy conditions, to anticipate a child running after a ball. By the time a human in in their mid teens they have acquired the base knowledge...
Small models need to have enough base knowledge to be able to be good enough -- even in a seemingly narrow regime. Where is that? Obviously they don't need all the obscure knowledge of a frontier model but there is some base level which is probably more than it would first seem.
Also, some software businesses use a ton of aggregated or hard to get data which needs to be synthesized and that doesn't go away even if the llm driven coding is cheap.