Fair question but haven't we been doing this for decades? Very few people know how to write assembly and yet software has proliferated. This is just another abstraction.
> Fair question but haven't we been doing this for decades? Very few people know how to write assembly and yet software has proliferated. This is just another abstraction.
Not at all. Given any "layperson input", the expert who wrote the compiler that is supposed to turn it into assembly can describe in excruciating detail what the compiler will do and why. Not so with LLMs.
Said differently: If I perturb a source code file with a few bytes here and there, anyone with a modicum of understanding of the compiler used can understand why the assembly changed the way it did as a result. Not so with LLMs.
But there's a limit to that. There's (relatively) very few people that can explain the details of e.g. a compiler, compared to for example React front-end developers that build B2C software (...like me). And these software projects grow, ultimately to the limit of what one person can fit in their head.
Which is why we have lots of "rules" and standards on communication, code style, commenting, keeping history, tooling, regression testing, etc. And I'm afraid those will be the first to suffer when code projects are primarily written by LLMs - do they even write unit tests if you don't tell them to?
gspr|1 month ago
Not at all. Given any "layperson input", the expert who wrote the compiler that is supposed to turn it into assembly can describe in excruciating detail what the compiler will do and why. Not so with LLMs.
Said differently: If I perturb a source code file with a few bytes here and there, anyone with a modicum of understanding of the compiler used can understand why the assembly changed the way it did as a result. Not so with LLMs.
Cthulhu_|1 month ago
Which is why we have lots of "rules" and standards on communication, code style, commenting, keeping history, tooling, regression testing, etc. And I'm afraid those will be the first to suffer when code projects are primarily written by LLMs - do they even write unit tests if you don't tell them to?