Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLMs as the new high level language

federicopereiro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 396 posts

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#21

Post by Calavar »

echelon wrote: post #3

These models are nothing short of astounding. I can write a spec for an entirely new endpoint, and Claude figures out all of the middleware plumbing and the database queries. (The catch: this is in Rust and the SQL is raw, without an ORM. It just gets it. I'm reviewing the code, too, and it's mostly excellent.) I can ask Claude to add new data to the return payloads - it does it, and it can figure out the cache inval…

I'm not sure I'd call agents an army of juniors. More like a high school summer intern who has infinite time to do deep dives into StackOverflow but doesn't have nearly enough programming experience yet to have developed a "taste" for good code

In my experience, agentic LLMs tend to write code that is very branchy with cyclomatic complexity. They don't follow DRY principles unless you push them very hard in that direction (and even then not always), and sometimes they do things that just fly in the face of common sense. Example of that last part: I was writing some Ruby tests with Opus 4.6 yesterday, and I got dozens of tests that amounted to this:

   x = X.new
   assert x.kind_of?(X)
This is of course an entirely meaningless check. But if you aren't reading the tests and you just run the test job and see hundreds of green check marks and dozens of classes covered, it could give you a false sense of security

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#22

Post by beefsack »

dsr_ wrote: post #8

It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things. "I prompted it like this" "I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different" It's not programming. It might be having a pseudo-conversation with a complex system, but it's not programming.

Prompting isn't programming. Prompting is managing.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#23

Post by problynought »

dsr_ wrote: post #8

It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things. "I prompted it like this" "I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different" It's not programming. It might be having a pseudo-conversation with a complex system, but it's not programming.

All programming achieves the same outcome; requests the OS/machine set aside some memory to hold salient values and mutate those values in-line with mathematical recipe.

Functions like:

updatesUsername(string) returns result

...can be turned into generic functional euphemism

takeStringRtnBool(string) returns bool

...same thing. context can be established by the data passed in, external system interactions (updates user values, inventory of widgets)

as workers SWEs are just obfuscating how repetitive their effort is to people who don't know better

the era of pure data driven systems is arrived. in-line with the push to dump OOP we're dumping irrelevant context in the code altogether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-driven_programming

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#24

Post by smohare »

toprerules wrote: post #2

After working with the latest models I think these "it's just another tool" or "another layer of abstraction" or "I'm just building at a different level" kind of arguments are wishful thinking. You're not going to be a designer writing blueprints for a series of workers to execute on, you're barely going to be a product manager translating business requirements into a technical specification before AI closes that gap…

[dead]

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#25

Post by toprerules »

asa400 wrote: post #19
toprerules wrote: post #2

After working with the latest models I think these "it's just another tool" or "another layer of abstraction" or "I'm just building at a different level" kind of arguments are wishful thinking. You're not going to be a designer writing blueprints for a series of workers to execute on, you're barely going to be a product manager translating business requirements into a technical specification before AI closes that gap…

If all you (not you specifically, more of a royal “you” or “we”) are is a collection of skills centered around putting code into an editor and opening pull requests as fast as possible, then sure, you might be cooked. But if your job depends on taste, design, intuition, sociability, judgement, coaching, inspiring, explaining, or empathy in the context of using technology to solve human problems, you’ll be fine. The p…

The question isn't whether businesses will have 0 human element to them, the question is does AI offer a big enough gap that technical skills are still required such that technical roles are still hired for. Someone in product can have all of those skills without a computer science degree, with no design experience, and AI will do the technical work at the level of design, implementation, and maintenance. What I am seeing with the new models isn't just writing code, it's taking fundamental problems as input and design wholistic software solutions as output - and the quality is there.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#26

Post by hackyhacky »

dsr_ wrote: post #8

It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things. "I prompted it like this" "I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different" It's not programming. It might be having a pseudo-conversation with a complex system, but it's not programming.

> "I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different"

I wrote a program in C and and gave it to gcc. Then I gave the same program to clang and I got a different result.

I guess C code isn't programming.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#27

Post by nly »

I have a source file of a few hundred lines implementing an algorithm that no LLM I've tried (and I've tried them all) is able to replicate, or even suggest, when prompted with the problem. Even with many follow up prompts and hints.

The implementations that come out are buggy or just plain broken

The problem is a relatively simple one, and the algorithm uses a few clever tricks. The implementation is subtle...but nonetheless it exists in both open and closed source projects.

LLMs can replace a lot of CRUD apps and skeleton code, tooling, scripting, infra setup etc, but when it comes to the hard stuff they still suck.

Give me a whiteboard and a fellow engineer anyday

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#28

Post by orbital-decay »

dsr_ wrote: post #8

It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things. "I prompted it like this" "I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different" It's not programming. It might be having a pseudo-conversation with a complex system, but it's not programming.

>"I prompted it like this"

>"I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different"

1:1 reproducibility is much easier in LLMs than in software building pipelines. It's just not guaranteed by major providers because it makes batching less efficient.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#29

Post by hackyhacky »

toprerules wrote: post #2

After working with the latest models I think these "it's just another tool" or "another layer of abstraction" or "I'm just building at a different level" kind of arguments are wishful thinking. You're not going to be a designer writing blueprints for a series of workers to execute on, you're barely going to be a product manager translating business requirements into a technical specification before AI closes that gap…

> The irony is that I haven't seen AI have nearly as large of an impact anywhere else.

We are in this pickle because programmers are good at making tools that help programmers. Programming is the tip of the spear, as far as AI's impact goes, but there's more to come.

Why pay an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts? Why pay an expensive lawyer to review your contract? Why pay a doctor, etc.

Short term, doing for lawyers, architects, civil engineers, doctors, etc what Claude Code has done for programmers is a winning business strategy. Long term, gaining expertise in any field of intellectual labor is setting yourself up to be replaced.

Post reply on HN