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> there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourse

> there are still going to be instances where describing what you want is actually challenging, to the point where it would be easier if you just did it yourself Yeah exactly. I've seen meetings between engineers get into a level of technical specificity where I've had the thought "we are just coding in english now." Even if you're able to communicate your intent with natural language rather than a "programming language," you still arrive at a level of concrete detail that is difficult or impossible to describe without some sort of standard technical shorthand or jargon. This is true whether the "listener" is an LLM, some other sophisticated machine interpreter, or just another person.

Bjorkbat 2y ago
Lately, with all this talk of natural-language-as-programming-language, I've tried reflecting on my own code and seeing how I might convey the same intent, but in English. It's made me realize that it's usually the rule that intent at least feels easier to convey through code rather than through natural language. This is especially true if I'm trying to perform some complex mathematical task that's geometric in nature. Put another way, it's probably easier to understand how poisson disc sampling works if you saw the code for it, vs if you read the actual paper, especially if the code had comments providing additional context for different blocks of code. Doesn't help that the paper uses complex mathematical terminology, whereas the code, at worst, might have very terse variable names And yet, I think a better example might be found in markup languages like HTML. Trying to convey the layout of a webpage using ONLY natural language seems really hard compared to using a markup language.