> The actual state of death becomes visible when demands for modifications of the program cannot be intelligently answered.
Yeah but we can ask an LLM to read the code and write documentation, if that happens.
Yeah but we can ask an LLM to read the code and write documentation, if that happens.
Also, no "small" program is ever at risk of dying in the sense that Naur describes it. Worst case, you can re-read the code. The problem lies with the giant enterprise code bases of the 60s and 70s where thousands of people have worked on it over the years. Even if you did have good documentation, it would be hundreds of pages and reading it might be more work than just reading the code.
Hopefully we can iterate and get the system producing useful documents automagically but my worry is that it will not generalise across different system and as a result we will have invested a huge amount of effort into creating "AI" generated docs for our system that could have been better spent just having humans write the docs.
But sure let's just have it generate docs, that's gonna work great.
Was some thread on here the other day, where someone said they routinely give Claude many paragraphs specifying what the code should and shouldn't do. Take 20 minutes just to type it up.
I mean even if that did work you still gotta read the docs to roughly the same degree as you would have had to read the code and you have to read the code to work with it anyway.
I'd see it like transcribing a piece of music where an LLM, or an uninformed human, would write down "this is a sequence of notes that follow a repetitive pattern across multiple distinct blocks. The first block has the lyrics X, Y ...", but a human would say "this is a pop song about Z, you might listen to it when you're feeling upset."
An LLM is not capable of subtext or reading between the lines or understanding intention or capability or sarcasm or other linguistic traits that apply a layer of unspoken context to what is actually spoken. Unless it matches a pattern.
It has one set of words, provided by you, and another set of words, provided by its model. You will get the bang average response every single time and mentally fill in the gaps yourself to make it work.