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When you want to change the resulting program (“formal logic”), you generally don’t change the prompt and regenerate everything (like you would do with source c

by layer8 18d ago

When you want to change the resulting program (“formal logic”), you generally don’t change the prompt and regenerate everything (like you would do with source code). Instead, you provide new natural-language instructions to have the LLM perform the change. This means that you don’t have a reproducible specification on the level where you are describing the specification. Therefore the thing that you are maintaining is not a natural-language artifact, it’s effectively still the formal description (program code). And that’s why the parent comment is saying that we need people that understand the thing that is being maintained, i.e. the program code, which is the source of truth about what is being maintained.

jeremyjh 18d ago
> we need people that understand the thing that is being maintained We do for a lot of software today, but not all of it. I think in a year we'll need them for less, but I'm not sure how much less. This claim isn't supported or justified by talking about natural language versus formal language. For the last 50 years or so the people shaping a lot of software in the most important ways are often using only natural language. The product manager doesn't understand the code today. They write PRDs and Jira tickets and comments in Slack, and software comes out. They have people test the software, report bugs, more software comes out. Eventually they decide its close enough to their vision to ship, without ever understanding or looking at any of the code. They can do that with human programmers or agent programmers. The former holds up better in larger systems, but I don't see any evidence for the proposition that this is due to the limits of natural language.
- layer8 18d ago
  Developers are making a lot of important decisions in detail that the product manager has little understanding of, and these often lie exactly in the disparity between natural and formal language. What the product manager writes isn’t a full specification of the system.
  - jeremyjh 17d ago
    That’s true, and LLMs also can make a lot of these decisions correctly.

by layer8 18d ago

jeremyjh 18d ago

> we need people that understand the thing that is being maintained We do for a lot of software today, but not all of it. I think in a year we'll need them for less, but I'm not sure how much less. This claim isn't supported or justified by talking about natural language versus formal language. For the last 50 years or so the people shaping a lot of software in the most important ways are often using only natural language. The product manager doesn't understand the code today. They write PRDs and Jira tickets and comments in Slack, and software comes out. They have people test the software, report bugs, more software comes out. Eventually they decide its close enough to their vision to ship, without ever understanding or looking at any of the code. They can do that with human programmers or agent programmers. The former holds up better in larger systems, but I don't see any evidence for the proposition that this is due to the limits of natural language.

layer8 18d ago
Developers are making a lot of important decisions in detail that the product manager has little understanding of, and these often lie exactly in the disparity between natural and formal language. What the product manager writes isn’t a full specification of the system.
- jeremyjh 17d ago
  That’s true, and LLMs also can make a lot of these decisions correctly.