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Identifiers are super important and should be chosen wisely, but a C program with English identifiers is still a C program, while an LLM prompt is in fact NL an
by d_tr 2y ago
Identifiers are super important and should be chosen wisely, but a C program with English identifiers is still a C program, while an LLM prompt is in fact NL and a whole new layer of that between your brain and the bytes. Which is why I think that saying "we already put NL between us and the bytes" minimizes that difference and is a bad take.
- dartos 2y agoExactly. Not to mention that our existing programming languages have a deterministic output given the same code and the same compiler. LLMs do not. Thus, LLM prompts are an entirely different class of tool than a programming language. This should be obvious to anyone who has written code, but alas.
- nailer 2y agoOoh. Good point. I guess we need traditional languages as a way to debug the created machine code. But… what if we didn’t? Ie the LLM made bytecode and we had some better way to talk about the concrete implementation.