Hacker News Reader

> With the new AI systems, the user no longer tells the computer what to do. Rather, the user tells the computer what outcome they want.

Maybe we can borrow programming paradigm terms here and describe this as Imperative UX versus Declarative UX. Makes me want to dive into SQL or XSLT and try to find more parallels.

View on HN

I was thinking of imperative vs declarative, too.

SQL is declaritive with a pre-defined syntax and grammar as an interface, where as the AI style of interaction has a natural language interface.

SQL and XSLT are declarative, but the outputs are clean and intuitive. The data model and data set are probably well understood, as is the mapping to and from the query.

AI is a very different type of declarative. It's messy, difficult to intuit, has more dimensionality, and the outputs can be signals rather than tabular data records.

It rhymes, but it doesn't feel the same.

The recent additions OpenAI have made allows for tighter control over the outputs. I think that is a very useful step forward.

Yeah, it's declarative but fuzzy and non-deterministic as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com