Yes, it is possible for a compiler to have a bug. No, that is I’m mo way analogous to AI producing buggy code.
I’ve experienced maybe two compiler bugs in my twenty year career. I have experienced countless AI mistakes - hundreds? Thousands? Already.
These are not the same and it has the whiff of sales patter trying to address objections. Please stop.
This even applies to human written code and human mistakes, as the expected cost of errors goes up we spend more time on having multiple people review the code and we worry more about carefully designing tests.
I’m hopeful what used to be tedious about the software development process (like correctness proving or documentation) becomes tractable enough with LLM’s to make the scale more manageable for us. That’s exciting to contemplate; think of the complexity categories we can feasibly challenge now!
By expressivity I mean that you can say what you mean, and the more expressive the language is, the easier that is to do.
It turns out saying what you mean is quite easy in plain English! The hard part is that English allows a lot of ambiguity. So the tradeoffs of how you express things are very different.
I also want to note how remarkable it is that humans have built a machine that can effectively understand natural language.
AI tools are similar. You can trust them because they are good enough, and you need a way (testing) to make sure what is produced meet your specific requirements. Of course they may fail for you, doesn’t mean they aren’t useful in other cases.
All of that is simply common sense.
Is that why we have legal codes spanning millions of pages?
That's what I disagree with - everything you said is obviously true, but I don't see how it's related to the discussion.
There are however some applications where ambiguity is fine. For example, I might have a recipe website where I tell a LLM to "add a slider for the user to scale the number of servings". There's a ton of ambiguity there but if you don't care about the exact details then I can see a future where LLMs do something reasonable 99.9999% of the time and no one does more than glance at it and say it looks fine.
How long it is until we reach that point and if we'll ever reach that point is of course still up for debate, but I dnt think it's completely unrealistic.
What’s to stop the barista putting sulphuric acid in your coffee? Well, mainly they don’t because they need a job and don’t want to go to prison. AIs don’t go to prison, so you’re hoping they won’t do it because you’ve promoted them well enough.
Yes, making sure the program does what you want. Which is already part of the existing software development life cycle. Just as using natural language to specify work already is: It's where things start and return to over and over throughout any project. Further: LLM's frequently understand what I want better than other developers. Sure, lots of times they don't. But they're a lot better at it than they were 6 months ago, and a year ago they barely did so at all save for scripts of a few dozen lines.