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Comment by quasarj | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused, it looks like you've just written a new terse language that now costs money to compile?

Afaik there's no language - the pseudocode can be written however you want. And the costing money to compile? If you're prompting an llm you're already doing that, just with prose instead of pseudocode. I'm not sure this approach is a good idea, but it might be - and imo it's worth trying :)

Yes, there's no language. And exactly - we're effectively already doing this, but with waaay more words.

> I'm not sure this approach is a good idea, but it might be

After the last year, I feel like this sentence could replace half my outbound emails.

Yes exactly. Except now, the language has zero constraints. It can be a perfect distillation of your intentions.

You might think, well code is perfect. But code is syntactically perfect, because it has to be. Because compilers can handle very little ambiguity. But that doesn't mean it's a perfect representation of your thoughts. A huge part of language design is for the compiler, not for the author.

And I'm not 100% sure of this, but I'm fairly confident that this approach would be far more token efficient than the way we currently use AI for programming.

I could do this before too. The way I work is that I just write some functions, fully annotated, in whatever language the project is in, with a comment on what I expect the code to do, and an empty return. Then get an LLM to fill in the functions.

Helps me think about the problem, like your post mentioned, but I don't have to pay a tax on converting a prototyping language to a different language.

This is how I liked to write software pre-LLM. Top down. Write the interface and tests first, implementation second. I think I got it from SICP. "Wish-driven programming" I think I heard once.

That’s exactly what this editor is for, except that your original written version is retained and source-mapped to the code that it generated. So as a project grows in size and complexity, you have a smaller foot print of human-written intent that acts as a reference. There’s no “prototyping language”, it’s just whatever you want to write.

I have to admit, I am unsure if this article was some sort of parody.

Same, I am still thinking that it's a parody: going full loop back to programming

Basically yes that’s what I’m proposing. Not sure if I’d describe it as a loop though - more like returning to some midway point after having traveled too far in one direction.

Fully manual coding is the most reliable but extremely slow and costly.

Fully LLM driven coding is extremely fast, but for serious work is too unreliable.

Spec-driven development might be viable, but too often the specs end up being LLM maintained, which defeats the purpose.

You need some hard boundary in the codebase where only human hands touch the files. And you want to enable the velocity that AI allows. So yes, semi-formal programming does seem like a promising solution.

Technically speaking everything costs money to compile in the form of electricity. This is just...inefficient compilation.

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