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Comment by beaker52 | Hacker News Reader

(Replying to myself because hn)

That’s not the only difference at all. A good use of an LLM might be to ask it what the difference between using an LLM and writing code for a compiler is.

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Equally a good use for a legacy compiler that compiles a legacy language. Granted, you are going to have to write a lot more boilerplate to see it function (that being the difference, after all), but the outcome will be the same either way. It's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day.

Sorry friend, if you can’t identify the important differences between a compiler and an LLM, either intentionally or unintentionally (I can’t tell), then I must question the value of whatever you have to say on the topic.

The important difference is the reduction in boilerplate, which allows programs to be written with (often) significantly less code. Hence the time savings (and fun) spoken of in the original article.

This isn't really a new phenomenon. Languages have been adding things like arrays and maps as builtins to reduce the boilerplate required around them. The modern languages of which we speak take that same idea to a whole new level, but such is the nature of evolution.

No, when we write code it has a an absolute and specific meaning to the compiler. When we write words to an LLM they are written in a non-specific informal language (usually English) and processed non-deterministically too. This is an incredibly important distinction that makes coding, and asking the LLM to code, two completely different ball games. One is formal, one is not.

And yes, this isn’t a new phenomenon.

It's different in some ways (such is evolution), but is not a distinction that matters. Kind of like the difference between imperative and declarative programming. Different language models, but all the same at the end of the day.

I hope you are joking.

The only other difference mentioned is in implementation, but concepts are not defined by implementation. Obviously you could build a C compiler with neural nets. That wouldn't somehow magically turn everything into something completely different just because someone used a 'novel' approach inside of the black box.

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