[tsukikage]

The hard part of software engineering, and indeed many other pursuits, is working out what it is you actually need to happen and articulating that clearly enough for another entity to follow your instructions.

Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.

[nl]

> Using English, with all its inherent ambiguity, to attempt to communicate with an alien (charitably) mind very much does /not/ make this task any easier if the thing you need to accomplish is of any complexity at all.

This just isn't the case.

English can communicate very simply a set of "if.. then.." statements and an LLM can convert them to whatever stupid config language with I'm dealing with today.

I just don't care if Cloudflare's wrangler.toml uses emojis to express cases or AWS's Cloudformation required some Shakespearean sonnet to express the dependencies in whatever the format of the day is.

Or don't get me started on trying to work out which Pulami Google module I'm supposed to use for this service. Ergh.

I can express very clearly what I want, let a LLM translate it then inspect the config and go "oh that's how you do that".

It's great, and is radically easier than working through some docs written by a person who knows what they are doing and assumed you do too.

[9dev]

Expressing "I want to build a Java app in a single file that I can execute on Windows, MacOS, and Linux" is absolutely straightforward and non-ambiguous in English, whereas it requires really a lot of arcane wizardry in build tooling languages to achieve the desired result.

Claude will understand and carry out this fairly complex task just fine, so I doubt you have actually worked with it yet.

[vanviegen]

You've clearly never had to work with Gradle. :-)