Comment by xscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xscott | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot that's worth thinking about and discussing on this topic, but it's too loaded with emotional stuff for many people to hope for a productive discussion.

I'm a programming languages nerd. I was paid to program in over 20 different languages over my 25 year career. I read up on many more languages along the way, and I wrote pet projects in a few of those. I've written a couple assemblers, compilers, and interpreters for my own languages.

I think literally everyone should be taught to program in elementary school. It's arguably one of the best ways to teach logical thought and careful organization of ideas. I like Alan Perlis's quote: You think you know when you can learn, are more sure when you can write, even more when you can teach, but certain when you can program.

With all of that out of the way, I think there are interesting questions to ask going forward:

If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.

What are the best programming languages for LLMs to program with? Could someone design a better language that fits their strengths and weaknesses? I think the most popular human languages have way too much affordance for concerns that don't apply to models. I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect. There's a slight chicken and egg problem based on the training sets used by large models, but this can be addressed with LoRA tuning and similar techniques for open weight models.

How can we make LLMs scale better so that people who don't like to program can get better "vibe coding" results? Tools like Excel are huge force multipliers for so many people who aren't interested in writing traditional code. I think it should be possible for non-programmers to solve their own problems and trust the results without becoming programmers.

Anyways, I've got my own partially formed answers to those questions, but I'd like to hear what other people who aren't still suffering stages of LLM programming grief have to say and ask.

> If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models?

Are you saying that 10 programmers cost as much as 2 random people and some LLM subscriptions? Sign me up for the 10 programmers, then. I wouldn’t even need most of them, I’ve done a lot with teams of two and three, and more may just get in the way. I couldn’t care less how “AI friendly” the other people are; if they’re not programmers, using LLMs to produce a program is going to lead to bad results. Why would I even hire them? Might as well do the prompting myself if the results are that good in your fantasy scenario.

> Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.

So, if it doesn’t come together, I either empowered 10 people to feed their families, gave them opportunities to hone their skills, and possibly developed new friendships and contacts for future endeavours (where maybe next time they’ll even hire me); or I helped just 2 people with no return and lined the pockets of rich people who are actively exploiting everyone else and destroying the environment and social trust for personal profit.

Your scenario is truly bizarre. Is it just an obvious ploy to detect those who lack in empathy and only think of personal profit?

As a side note, I previously commented somewhere else that, if a language has a terse way and a verbose way to do the same thing, preferring the terse way might be more economical because it saves bunch of tokens for the LLM. But for humans to review the code, we may need some mechanism to translate the code from terse way to the verbose way, if the human has a hard time understanding the terse code.

> If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.

I know quite a few non-technical people that started vibe-coding this year and got good results for their ideas. What language did they use? They just asked the AI what language or tool would be best for the idea, then followed the AI's suggestions. All the setup, configuration etc. were done by the AI. They learned a bunch of things along the way, but their main focus is still on the big picture idea, not the technical details. After the project is done, they are still not technical experts, but at least they have something to run with in the real world.

> we may need some mechanism to translate the code from terse way to the verbose way

I completely agree. Nothing says humans need to read in exactly the syntax the model wrote. We could give the model a typed lisp, or forth, or rebol, or whatever works best, and it could be formatted into LaTeX with infix operators for the humans.

This was true before LLMs though. So many people love curlies or love indentation, love 2 spaces or 4 spaces. Programmers have been married to text files as the authoritative source, using grep to search, patches to update. The expressions could be rows in a database. Then finding and formatting are done as views from that.

> I know quite a few non-technical people that started vibe-coding this year and got good results for their ideas.

Me too, but a few of them hit limits. A couple months ago, I'd say vibe coding fell apart at 2k loc or something. It goes further now, but I think it's fragile after you take the "one shot prompt" and try to make significant changes once the pattern is set. There's probably a way to push these limits much further out so that non-programmers can do more, focusing on what they care about, and not bogged down in programming details they don't.

> If you were starting a business for a great software idea, with your own savings on the line, would you hire 10 AI hostile programmers to implement the idea or 2 AI friendly people and get them some subscriptions to the top models? Remember: if it doesn't come together, it's YOUR money on the line.

Actually a pretty interesting question. I think it depends on the software, if it's some web app or something fairly trivial and mechanical the AI friendly devs would probably be cheaper and faster. If it was like, a robotics platform or something I would hire the 10 AI hostile devs. But ideally I would hire 5 expert programmers who use AI in a pragmatic way.

IMHO, we need programming (formal) metalanguage, not just another language. Something in which can express e.g. an architectural discussion with LLM.

Natural languages are not logically sound, because meaning of words can shift. We need to express ideas about programs, desired properties, and specification in a language that is semantically sound and thus gives consistent solutions to consistent requirements.

Of course, the metalanguage can have the same foundation as the programming language itself. It could be expressed in Lean for instance.

What is needed is to build a library of abstractions in the metalanguage that are similar to words understood by an LLM, but in a logically consistent manner.

> I think letting LLMs program in human friendly languages makes the results more difficult for humans to inspect.

Does it? I think for example Ruby seems to work quite well with LLMs in this regard. Or is this not what you would consider human friendly?

why would you even hire 2 AI friendly people when you could just prompt it yourself? we wouldn't even need you anymore

I agree. I believe LLMs are ushering in a new golden age for programming language design and implementation.

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