4 ms·

Yet again we can pull out Edsger W.Dijkstra's 1978 article, "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"" "In order to make machines significantly eas

Yet again we can pull out Edsger W.Dijkstra's 1978 article, "On the foolishness of "natural language programming"" "In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt."

woeirua 7mo ago
Djikstra wasn’t a god. He’s going to be wrong on this one.
- bigstrat2003 7mo ago
  He's not wrong. People are just drinking the AI kool-aid too hard to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
  - esafak 7mo ago
    How come it works with humans? Give seasoned engineers a spec and they'll create a working product. Many software companies are created and guided on the verbal directions of people who don't code.
    - Capricorn2481 7mo ago
      Because humans are fundamentally different from LLMs regardless of how much people draw the comparison.
      - esafak 7mo ago
        Go on. How, in this context?
        Capricorn2481 7mo ago
        A) My coworkers care. Their job is to solve the problem in the most pragmatic way possible, and the LLMs job is to produce plausible answers, even if they literally write broken syntax. They are not capable of caring about anything, but they can sound like they care. B) They are shit for frontend work. This is the big one, and maybe we will someday, but we really haven't bridged the gap between an LLM seeing code and matching it to something on screen. People are well aware that agents need tight feedback loops to really be effective, which is more doable for server side code where you can setup a good test apparatus (still a pain in the ass for other reasons). But the thing a developer does most often is instantly see what their code changes did to a project visually. This is a huge gap with LLMs. We are at the level where an LLM can check that the site loads to begin with. That's it. We can't trust it to make functioning UI, and we sure as hell can't trust it to compare code against UI unless we ask it something very specific. Watch the LLM clocks sometime [1]. I was shocked to see even 5.2 codex making complete nonsense every few minutes. C) My coworkers have narrow experience in the field we work in, which means they are frequently zooming past things that a general approximation of intelligence like Claude gets tripped up on. ChatGPT is trained on the entire corpus of humanity, yet doesn't understand there is such a thing as bad language servers. That a linting error is not inherently problematic and you don't need to spend $5 in tokens investigating it. This is something a junior developer understands. Why do I need to constantly watch and stop my agent and re-explain things we learned in the first week of programming? D) Because LLMs are an approximation of correct solutions, god help you if you work in spaces where your syntax looks similar to other frameworks. I work in a lot of legacy apps that are framework spin-offs of other framework spin-offs. Stuff that's half documented and poorly made. There is no testing for these projects and no good IDE support. So if something is an offshoot of OctoberCMS, ChatGPT is just going to make up a bunch of methods from OctoberCMS even if they are completely invalid in this project. Agents are completely useless in projects like these. E) Local models aren't there yet, and the fact that the entire industry is cool with letting their skills atrophy so hard that they are completely dependent on the livelihoods and structures of a few companies they hadn't even heard of 5 years ago is deeply concerning and unprofessional. I personally wouldn't hire someone so short sighted. Believing in LLMs taking over all coding work is a fundamental disbelief in Humanity, and I'm just not behind it. The most amazing thing about development is how much knowledge share we have and how cooperative we are. A future where no one knows how to do anything anymore is the future where tech truly goes off the rails. [1] https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
    - ryanobjc 7mo ago
      I think "working product" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you here. I think anyone who has done serious product development wouldn't be so flippant and dismissive about the difficulties of even conveying WHAT to build, let along getting the right balance of quality, timeliness, and actual functionality.
bitwize 7mo ago
Dijkstra also mockingly described software engineering as "the doomed discipline" because its goal was to determine "how to program if you cannot". "How to program if you cannot" has been solved now.
stevekrouse 7mo ago
Such a perfect quote! Thank you! Will add it to my collection

woeirua 7mo ago

Djikstra wasn’t a god. He’s going to be wrong on this one.

bigstrat2003 7mo ago
He's not wrong. People are just drinking the AI kool-aid too hard to realize that the emperor has no clothes.
- esafak 7mo ago
  How come it works with humans? Give seasoned engineers a spec and they'll create a working product. Many software companies are created and guided on the verbal directions of people who don't code.
  - Capricorn2481 7mo ago
    Because humans are fundamentally different from LLMs regardless of how much people draw the comparison.
    - esafak 7mo ago
      Go on. How, in this context?
      - Capricorn2481 7mo ago
        A) My coworkers care. Their job is to solve the problem in the most pragmatic way possible, and the LLMs job is to produce plausible answers, even if they literally write broken syntax. They are not capable of caring about anything, but they can sound like they care. B) They are shit for frontend work. This is the big one, and maybe we will someday, but we really haven't bridged the gap between an LLM seeing code and matching it to something on screen. People are well aware that agents need tight feedback loops to really be effective, which is more doable for server side code where you can setup a good test apparatus (still a pain in the ass for other reasons). But the thing a developer does most often is instantly see what their code changes did to a project visually. This is a huge gap with LLMs. We are at the level where an LLM can check that the site loads to begin with. That's it. We can't trust it to make functioning UI, and we sure as hell can't trust it to compare code against UI unless we ask it something very specific. Watch the LLM clocks sometime [1]. I was shocked to see even 5.2 codex making complete nonsense every few minutes. C) My coworkers have narrow experience in the field we work in, which means they are frequently zooming past things that a general approximation of intelligence like Claude gets tripped up on. ChatGPT is trained on the entire corpus of humanity, yet doesn't understand there is such a thing as bad language servers. That a linting error is not inherently problematic and you don't need to spend $5 in tokens investigating it. This is something a junior developer understands. Why do I need to constantly watch and stop my agent and re-explain things we learned in the first week of programming? D) Because LLMs are an approximation of correct solutions, god help you if you work in spaces where your syntax looks similar to other frameworks. I work in a lot of legacy apps that are framework spin-offs of other framework spin-offs. Stuff that's half documented and poorly made. There is no testing for these projects and no good IDE support. So if something is an offshoot of OctoberCMS, ChatGPT is just going to make up a bunch of methods from OctoberCMS even if they are completely invalid in this project. Agents are completely useless in projects like these. E) Local models aren't there yet, and the fact that the entire industry is cool with letting their skills atrophy so hard that they are completely dependent on the livelihoods and structures of a few companies they hadn't even heard of 5 years ago is deeply concerning and unprofessional. I personally wouldn't hire someone so short sighted. Believing in LLMs taking over all coding work is a fundamental disbelief in Humanity, and I'm just not behind it. The most amazing thing about development is how much knowledge share we have and how cooperative we are. A future where no one knows how to do anything anymore is the future where tech truly goes off the rails. [1] https://clocks.brianmoore.com/ https://clocks.brianmoore.com/
  - ryanobjc 7mo ago
    I think "working product" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for you here. I think anyone who has done serious product development wouldn't be so flippant and dismissive about the difficulties of even conveying WHAT to build, let along getting the right balance of quality, timeliness, and actual functionality.

bitwize 7mo ago

Dijkstra also mockingly described software engineering as "the doomed discipline" because its goal was to determine "how to program if you cannot". "How to program if you cannot" has been solved now.

stevekrouse 7mo ago

Such a perfect quote! Thank you! Will add it to my collection