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One comparable tool to LLMs in software history is the spreadsheet. Which also defines a new / different abstraction level that doesn't require "programming". W
by softwaredoug 3y ago
One comparable tool to LLMs in software history is the spreadsheet. Which also defines a new / different abstraction level that doesn't require "programming". While it didn't cause the death of programming, a lot of non-technical people can get a lot of work done without programmers, that in the past may have required months of dev work.
One of those things we take for granted now, but was absolutely transformative in the history of computing
- lenerdenator 3y agoThe spreadsheet is a wonderful way to create tech debt. So, it's very comparable to an LLM that spits out bad code.
- softwaredoug 3y agoLike LLMs it’s good enough until it’s not good enough :)
- jprete 3y agoSpreadsheets aren't fundamentally different from programming, though. It's one thing to have a nice neat way to see all (or many of) the variables at once and do computations on them. It's quite another to have fuzzy AI programming where the system will silently make invisible assumptions in writing code for you. Understanding and evaluating assumptions is a skill currently learned by coding; learning how to tell AIs what you want is not a substitute for rigor.