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

codespeak.dev

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

#171

Post by issamG »

sutterd wrote: post #123

I am trying a similar spec driven development idea in a project I am working on. One big difference is that my specifications are not formalized that much. Tney are in plain language and are read directly by the LLM to convert to code. That seems like the kind of thing the LLM is good at. One other feature of this is that it allows me to nudge the implmentation a little with text in the spec outside of the formal req…

Do you save these "prompts" so you can improve, and in turn improve the code. to me Spec Driven Development is more than a spec to generate code, structured or not.

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

#172

Post by eterps »

roxolotl wrote: post #7

This doesn't seem particularly formal. I still remain unconvinced reducing is really going to be valuable. Code obviously is as formal as it gets but as you trend away from that you quickly introduce problems that arise from lack of formality. I could see a world in which we're all just writing tests in the form of something like Gherkin though.

> I could see a world in which we're all just writing tests in the form of something like Gherkin though.

That works great in practice, Gherkin even has a markdown dialect [1].

If you combine it with a tool like aico [2] you can have a really effective development workflow.

[1] https://github.com/cucumber/gherkin/blob/main/MARKDOWN_WITH_...

[2] https://github.com/jurriaan/aico

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

#174

Post by CWIZO »

vbezhenar wrote: post #111
newsoftheday wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually, we'll end up in a world where humans don't need to touch code, but we are not there yet. Will we though? Wouldn't AI need to reach a stage where it is a tool, like a compiler, which is 100% deterministic?

Compiler is not 100% deterministic. Its output can change when you upgrade its version, its output can change when you change optimization options. Using profile-guided optimization can also change between runs.

If you change inputs then obviously you will get a different output. Crucially using the same inputs, however, produces the same output. So compilers are actually deterministic.

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

#175

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

uoaei wrote: post #163
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end is whether the code meets the functional and non functional requirements. And guess how much shoe companies make who manufacture shoes in sweatshop conditions versus the ones who make artisanal handcrafted shoes?

Functional requirements are known knowns. Out of bounds behavior is sometimes a known unknown, but in the era of generated code is exclusively unknown unknowns. Good luck speccing out all the unanticipated side effects and undefined behaviors. Perhaps you can prompt the agent in a loop a bnumber of times but it's hard to believe that the brute-force throw-more-tokens-at-it approach has the same level of return as a m…

Are you as a developer 100% able to trust that you didn’t miss anything? Your team if you are a team lead who delegates tasks to other developers? If you outsource non business things like Salesforce integrations etc do you know all of the code they wrote? Your library dependencies? Your infrastructure providers?

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

#176

Post by boznz »

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 a bit formal. Maybe something like this will be the output of the prompt to let me know what the AI is going to generate in the binary, but I doubt I will be writing code like this in 5 years, English will probably be fine at my level.

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

#177

Post by brabel »

dsr_ wrote: post #69
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…

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.

You got it completely backwards. The claim is that if the code does exactly what the spec says (which generated tests are supposed to "prove") then the actual code does not matter, even if it's different each time.

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

#178

Post by DoctorOW »

newsoftheday wrote: post #81
kleiba wrote: post #16

I cannot read light on black. I don't know, maybe it's a condition, or simply just part of getting old. But my eyes physically hurt, and when I look up from reading a light-on-black screen, even when I looked at only for a short moment, my eyes need seconds to adjust again. I know dark mode is really popular with the youngens but I regularly have to reach for reader mode for dark web pages, or else I simply cannot st…

Same for me, has been my whole life. I complain about it all the time. It's well documented that people can read black on light far better and with less eye strain than light on black; yet there seems to be a whole generation of developers determined to force us all to try and read it. Even the media sites like Netflix, Prime, etc. force it. At least Tubi's is somewhat more readable. Sometimes a site will include a b…

The most common mistake I see (on this website at least) is the assumption that one's programming competence is equal to their competence in other things.

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

#179

Post by niam »

The title writer might be doing the project a disservice by using the term "formal" to describe it, given that the project talks a lot about "specs". I mistook it to imply something about formal specification.

My quick understanding is that isn't really trying to utilize any formal specification but is instead trying to more-clearly map the relationship between, say, an individual human-language requirement you have of your application, and the code which implements that requirement.

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