You said just the same in another of your posts:
> if you can begin to describe the function well
So I have to learn how to describe code rather than just writing it as I've done for years?
Like I said, it's good for the small stuff, but bad for the big stuff, for now at least.
If we keep going down this path, we might end up inventing artificial languages for the purpose of precisely and unambiguously describing a program to a computer.
Its been around for decades. In fact this was the first approach to doing AI.
In logic programming you basically write concrete set of test cases and the compiler generates the code for which the test cases hold 'true'.
In other words you get a language to 'precisely and unambiguously describe a program', as you said. Compiler writes the code for you.
You ask it to give you one block at a time.
iterate over the above list and remove all strings matching 'apple'
open file and write the above list etc etc kind of stuff.
Notice how the English here can be interpreted only way, but the LLM is now a good intelligent coding assistant.
>>I think in code, I'd rather just write in code.
Continue to think, just make the LLM type out the outcome of your ideas.
Experienced developers develop fluency in their tools, such that writing such narrow natural language directives like you suggest is grossly regressive. Often, the tasks don't even go through our head in English like that, they simply flow from the fingers onto the screen in the language of our code, libraries, and architecture. Are you familiar with that experience?
What you suggest is precisely like a fluently bilingual person, who can already speak and think in beautiful, articulate, and idiomatic French, opting to converse to their Parisian friend through an English-French translation app instead of speaking to them directly.
When applied carefully, that technique might help someone who wants to learn French get more and deeper exposure than without a translation app, as they pay earnest attention to the input and output going through their app.
And that technique surely helps someone who never expects to learn French navigate their way through the conversations they need to have in a sufficient way, perhaps even opening new and eventful doors for them.
But it's an absolutely absurd technique for people whose fluency is such that there's no "translating" happening in the first place.
You can see that right?
>>You can see that right?
I get it, but this as big a paradigm shift as much as Google and Internet was to people in the 90s. Some times how you do things changes, and that paradigm becomes too big of a phenomenon to neglect. Thats where we are now.
You have to understand sometimes a trend or a phenomenon is so large that fighting it is pointless and some what resembles luddite behaviour. Not moving on with time is how you age out and get fired. Im not talking about a normal layoff, but more like becoming totally irrelevant to whatever that is happening in the industry at large.
But in this thread, it sounds like you're trying to suggest we're already there or close to it, but when you get into the details, you (inadvertently?) admitted that we're still a long ways off.
The narrow-if-common examples you cited slow experienced people down rather than speed them up. They surely make some simple tasks more accessible to inexperienced people, just like in the translation app example, and there's value in that, but it represents a curious flux at the edges of the industry -- akin VBA or early PHP -- rather than a revolutionary one at the center.
It's impactful, but still quite far from a paradigm shift.
Some quite large organisations have had all-hands meetings and told their developers that they must use LLM support and 'produce more', we'll see what comes of it. Unlike you I consider it to be a bad thing when management and owners undermine workers through technology and control (or discipline, or whatever we ought to call the current fashion), i.e. the luddites were right and it's not a bad thing to be a luddite.
Perhaps the written word just doesn’t describe the phenomenon well. Do you have any goto videos that show no -toy examples of pairing with an ai that you think illustrate your point well?
Especially if you’re fluent in an editor like Vim, Emacs, Sublime, have setup intellisense and snippets, know the language really well and are very familiar with the codebase.
But those had obvious benefits that made the learning cost sensible. “I can describe in precise English, a for loop and have the computer write it” flat sounds backwards.
> iterate over the above list and remove all strings matching 'apple'
> open file and write the above list etc etc kind of stuff.
This feels an awful lot like back in the day when we were required to get graphing calculators for math class (calculus, iirc), but weren't allowed to get the TI-92 line that also had equation solvers. If you had access to those, you'd cripple your own ability to actually do it by hand, and you'd never learn.
Then again, I also started programming with notepad++ for a few years and didn't really get into using "proper" editors until after I'd built up a decent facility for translating mind-to-code, which at the time was already becoming a road less travelled.
Thats pretty fast.
If you are telling me I ask it to write the entire 20,000 line script in one go, that's not how I think. Or how I go about approaching anything in my life, let alone code.
To go a far distance, I go in cycles of small distances, and I go a lot of them.
How many lines of natural language do you have to write in order to get it to generate these 50-100 lines correctly?
I find that by the time I have written the right prompt to get a decently accurate 100 lines of code from these tools, which I then hage to carefully review, I could have easily written the 100 lines of code myself
That doesn't make the tool very useful, especially because reviewing the code it generates is much slower than writing it myself
Not to mention the fact that even if it generates perfect bug free code (which I want to emphasize: it never ever seems to do) if I want to extend it I still have to read it thoroughly, understand it, and build my own mental model of the code structure
I think many people need to do some maintenance work on really old projects.
"One block at a time", I'd like to see the LLM which will find for me the CRON script doing some database work hidden in a forgotten VM.