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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

Those abstractions are deterministic. LLMs are not.

Human’s aren’t deterministic either.

We don't keep snapshots of humans in source control.

One time this codebase I worked on had an ASCII art image of one of the devs in it buried in a comment at the bottom of some random file. YMMV.

Garbage collection and what the JIT decides to do often isn't.

I think the more salient point is that going from writing assembler to C still required you to understand a lot about your machine, algorithms, how to debug issues, and in general it demanded problem solving skills.

LLMs eat away at all of these requirements.

Perhaps, but as far as I've seen they don't make the requirement go away. They do make many types of development far more accessible, as an extension of how SQL or Excel make development far more accessible. Sure, people make messes with the tools available, and sometimes the tools can handle it and still give you something useful, many times it takes someone actually knowing what they're doing to clean it up though.

Making things work demands problem solving skills. LLM or not. Perhaps one returns from the thoughtful debugging walk around the block knowing what question to pose to the LLM rather than what function to add logging to, but whatever. Everything is flux, this too shall end.

more importantly those abstractions were designed to try to make it easier to reason about what was going on for the author, build additional internal abstractions and to allow a reader to follow along and gain an understand of the structure. unless we believe that we can completely punt on having agency over the codebase, then llm code is only as valuable as it is readable.

The dream is that we keep agency, but also give up on reading code, by doing away with code as our level of abstraction and instead having humans edit human-readable spec files (including, say, depicting UIs directly with visual mocks). Like "no code" platforms, but for everything.

If by "human readable" you mean written in natural language, then those spec files will have ambiguities and imprecisions. If you make the spec precise and unambiguous enough, then it essentially just becomes a program written in code.

>The dream is that we keep agency, but also give up on reading code, by doing away with code as our level of abstraction and instead having humans edit human-readable spec files (including, say, depicting UIs directly with visual mocks). Like "no code" platforms, but for everything.

Human language is famously terrible at being unambiguous.

That's ok if you and the AI are on the same page. And it is possible to write more rigorous natural language, e.g. laws are written in human languages, and yet judges and lawyers agree on how to interpret most of them and there's a defined arbitration process to resolve any new ambiguities.

> if you and the AI are on the same page

But that's the thing, you and the AI might be "on the same page" for one prompt, and then you aren't for the next.

> and yet judges and lawyers agree on how to interpret most of them

Um, no? Lawyers and judges frequently disagree on how laws should be interpreted. And it is often not written in a way that a layperson can easily understand.

> defined arbitration process to resolve any new ambiguities.

That is famously slow and expensive, and can resul in something very different from what the lawmakers originally intended.

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