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LLMs as the new high level language

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Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#201

Post by pjmlp »

anon946 wrote: post #126

Isn't this a little bit of a category error? LLMs are not a language. But prompts to LLMs are written in a language, more or less a natural language such as English. Unfortunately, natural languages are not very precise and full of ambiguity. I suspect that different models would interpret wordings and phrases slightly differently, leading to behaviors in the resulting code that are difficult to predict.

Not really, because when they are feed into agents, those agents will take over tasks that previously required writing some kinds of classical programming.

I have already watched integrations between SaaS being deployed with agents instead of classical middleware.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#203

Post by bandrami »

fulafel wrote: post #200
zekica wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't think all the way about refining your prompt for LLMs as they are probabilistic. Your re-prompts are just retrying until you hit a jackpot - refining only works to increase the chance to get what you want. When making them deterministic (setting the temperature to 0), LLMs (even new ones) get stuck in loops for longer streams of output tokens. The only way to make sure you get the same output twice is to us…

Programs written in traditional PLs are also often probabilistic. It seems that the same mechanisms could be used to address this in both types (formal methods).

Huh?

What's an example of a probabilistic programming language?

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#204

Post by mike_hearn »

hackyhacky wrote: post #29
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 an expensive architect to design your new office building, when AI will do it for peanuts?

Will it? AI is getting good at some parts of programming because of RLVR. You can test architectural designs automatically to some extent but not entirely, because people tend to want unique buildings that stand out (if it weren't the case architects would have already become a niche profession due to everyone using prefabs all the time). At some point an architectural design has to be built and you can't currently simulate real building sites at high speed inside a datacenter. This use case feels marginal.

There's going to be a lot of cases like this. The safe jobs are ones where there's little training data available online, the job has a large component of unarticulated experience or intuition, and where you can't verify purely in software whether the work artifact is correct or not.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#205

Post by Davidzheng »

sublinear wrote: post #190
DaedalusII wrote: post #183

The biggest and least controversial thing will be when anthropic create a onedrive/googledrive integration that lets white collar employees create, edit, and export word documents into pdfs, referring to other files in the folder. This alone will increase average white paper employee productivity by 100x and lead to the most job displacement. For instance: Here is an email from my manager at 1pm today. Open the polic…

Your example actually perfectly describes why it won't displace anyone. The user still has to be in the loop to instruct the LLM every time, and the tiniest nuances in each execution of that work still matters. If it didn't we'd have replaced people with bash scripts many decades ago. When we've tried to do that, the maintenance of those scripts became a game of whack-a-mole that never ended and they're eventually ab…

Even if your argument is correct here, it would only mean this particular method of replacement doesn't immediately work for this job.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#207

Post by feverzsj »

abcde666777 wrote: post #130

Are these kinds of articles a new breed of rage bait? They keep ending up on the front page with thriving comment sections, but in terms of content they're pretty low in nutritional value. So I'm guessing they just rise because they spark a debate?

You can get to the front page easily with dozen upvotes, like from your colleagues and friends. Sadly, that's possibly the only way to get your post some attention here now.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#208

Post by elzbardico »

abcde666777 wrote: post #130

Are these kinds of articles a new breed of rage bait? They keep ending up on the front page with thriving comment sections, but in terms of content they're pretty low in nutritional value. So I'm guessing they just rise because they spark a debate?

Vibe coders are the new eternal september

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#209

Post by elzbardico »

pjmlp wrote: post #201
anon946 wrote: post #126

Isn't this a little bit of a category error? LLMs are not a language. But prompts to LLMs are written in a language, more or less a natural language such as English. Unfortunately, natural languages are not very precise and full of ambiguity. I suspect that different models would interpret wordings and phrases slightly differently, leading to behaviors in the resulting code that are difficult to predict.

Not really, because when they are feed into agents, those agents will take over tasks that previously required writing some kinds of classical programming. I have already watched integrations between SaaS being deployed with agents instead of classical middleware.

I've seen them too. They are not pretty.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#210

Post by matheus-rr »

The intermediate product argument is the strongest point in this thread. When we went from assembly to C, the debugging experience changed fundamentally. When we went from C to Java, how we thought about memory changed. With LLMs, I'm still debugging the same TypeScript and Python I was before.

The generation step changed. The maintenance step didn't. And most codebases spend 90% of their life in maintenance mode.

The real test of whether prompts become a "language" is whether they become versioned, reviewed artifacts that teams commit to repos. Right now they're closer to Slack messages than source files. Until prompt-to-binary is reliable enough that nobody reads the intermediate code, the analogy doesn't hold.

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