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Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

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Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#61

Post by abreslav »

le-mark wrote: post #37

This concept is assuming a formalized language would make things easier somehow for an llm. That’s making some big assumptions about the neuro anatomy if llms. This [1] from the other day suggests surprising things about how llms are internally structured; specifically that encoding and decoding are distinct phases with other stuff in between. Suggesting language once trained isn’t that important. [1] https://news.yc…

We are not trying to make things easier for LLMs. LLMs will be fine. CodeSpeak is built for humans, because we benefit from some structure, knowing how to express what we want, etc.

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#62

Post by gentooflux »

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #51
onion2k wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output (without feeding the current code into the re-apply and let it just recommend changes) If the result is always provably correct it doesn't matter whether or not it's different at the code level. People interested in systems like this believe that the outcome of what the code does is infinity more important than the co…

That's a huge "if."

I usually invert those to reduce nesting

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#64

Post by lifis »

lifis wrote: post #38

As far as I can tell it's not a new language, but rather an alternative workflow for LLM-based development along with a tool that implements it. The idea, IIUC, seems to be that instead of directly telling an LLM agent how to change the code, you keep markdown "spec" files describing what the code does and then the "codespeak" tool runs a diff on the spec files and tells the agent to make those changes; then you chec…

Also they seem to want to run this as a business, which seems absurd to me since I don't see how they can possibly charge money, and anyway the idea is so simple that it can be reimplemented in less than a week (less than a day for a basic version) and those alternative implementations may turn out to be better.

It also seems to be closed-source, which means that unless they open the source very soon it will very likely be immediately replaced in popularity by an open source version if it turns out to gain traction.

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#65

Post by ppqqrr »

i’ve been doing this for a while, you create an extra file for every code file, sketch the code as you currently understand it (mostly function signatures and comments to fill in details), ask the LLM to help identify discrepancies. i call it “overcoding”.

i guess you can build a cli toolchain for it, but as a technique it’s a bit early to crystallize into a product imo, i fully expect overcoding to be a standard technique in a few years, it’s the only way i’ve been able to keep up with AI-coded files longer than 1500 lines

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#66

Post by __loam »

onion2k wrote: post #49
the_duke wrote: post #19

This doesn't make too much sense to me. * This isn't a language, it's some tooling to map specs to code and re-generate * Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output (without feeding the current code into the re-apply and let it just recommend changes) * Models are evolving rapidly, this months flavour of Codex/Sonnet/etc would very likely generate different co…

Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output (without feeding the current code into the re-apply and let it just recommend changes) If the result is always provably correct it doesn't matter whether or not it's different at the code level. People interested in systems like this believe that the outcome of what the code does is infinity more important than the co…

The code is what the code does.

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#68

Post by cratermoon »

lich_king wrote: post #5

We built LLMs so that you can express your ideas in English and no longer need to code. Also, English is really too verbose and imprecise for coding, so we developed a programming language you can use instead. Now, this gives me a business idea: are you tired of using CodeSpeak? Just explain your idea to our product in English and we'll generate CodeSpeak for you.

relevant Dijkstra https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

"In order to make machines significantly easier to use, it has been proposed (to try) to design machines that we could instruct in our native tongues. this would, admittedly, make the machines much more complicated, but, it was argued, by letting the machine carry a larger share of the burden, life would become easier for us. It sounds sensible provided you blame the obligation to use a formal symbolism as the source of your difficulties. But is the argument valid? I doubt."

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#69

Post by dsr_ »

onion2k wrote: post #49
the_duke wrote: post #19

This doesn't make too much sense to me. * This isn't a language, it's some tooling to map specs to code and re-generate * Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output (without feeding the current code into the re-apply and let it just recommend changes) * Models are evolving rapidly, this months flavour of Codex/Sonnet/etc would very likely generate different co…

Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output (without feeding the current code into the re-apply and let it just recommend changes) If the result is always provably correct it doesn't matter whether or not it's different at the code level. People interested in systems like this believe that the outcome of what the code does is infinity more important than the co…

Let's rephrase:

Since nobody involved actually cares whether the code works or not, it doesn't matter whether it's a different wrong thing each time.

Re: Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English

#70

Post by lucasoshiro »

souvlakee wrote: post #21
lich_king wrote: post #5

We built LLMs so that you can express your ideas in English and no longer need to code. Also, English is really too verbose and imprecise for coding, so we developed a programming language you can use instead. Now, this gives me a business idea: are you tired of using CodeSpeak? Just explain your idea to our product in English and we'll generate CodeSpeak for you.

No joke. I'm 100% sure that if it's successful, we will find CC's skill to write specs for CodeSpeak.

Yeah. It's hard to express and understand nested structures in a natural language yet they are easy in high-level programming languages. E.g. "the dog of first son of my neighbour" vs "me.neighbour.sons[0].dog", "sunny and hot, or rainy but not cold" vs "(sunny && hot) || (rainy && !cold)".

In the past maths were expressed using natural language, the math language exists because natural language isn't clear enough.

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