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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

#31

Post by Sharlin »

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.

I'm sure that this time the language will be simple and English-like enough that execs can use it directly, similarly to COBOL and SQL.

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

#32

Post by embedding-shape »

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…

Do you sit in a bright room? Right now, during the night, I see your comment like this: https://i.imgur.com/c7fmBns.png, but during the day when the room is bright, I also see everything with light themes/background colors, otherwise it is indeed hard to see properly.

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

#33

Post by mosburger »

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.

sssssh! if this catches on we can keep our jobs! (j/k, mostly)

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

#35

Post by davedx »

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…

My process has organically evolved towards something similar but less strictly defined:

- I bootstrap AGENTS.md with my basic way of working and occasionally one or two project specific pieces

- I then write a DESIGN.md. How detailed or well specified it is varies from project to project: the other day I wrote a very complete DESIGN.md for a time tracking, invoice management and accounting system I wanted for my freelance biz. Because it was quite complete, the agent almost one-shot the whole thing

- I often also write a TECHNICAL-SPEC.md of some kind. Again how detailed varies.

- Finally I link to those two from the AGENTS. I also usually put in AGENTS that the agent should maintain the docs and keep them in sync with newer decisions I make along the way.

This system works well for me, but it's still very ad hoc and definitely doesn't follow any kind of formally defined spec standard. And I don't think it should, really? IMO, technically strict specs should be in your automated tests not your design docs.

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

#37

Post by le-mark »

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.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322887

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

#38

Post by lifis »

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 check the code and commit both updated specs and code.

It has the advantage that the prompts are all saved along with the source rather than lost, and in a format that lets you also look at the whole current specification.

The limitation seems to be that you can't modify the code yourself if you want the spec to reflect it (and also can't do LLM-driven changes that refer to the actual code), and also that in general it's not guaranteed that the spec actually reflects all important things about the program, so the code does also potentially contain "source" information (for example, maybe your want the background of a GUI to be white and it is so because the LLM happened to choose that, but it's not written in the spec).

The latter can maybe be mitigated by doing multiple generations and checking them all, but that multiplies LLM and verification costs.

Also it seems that the tool severely limits the configurability of the agentic generation process, although that's just a limitation of the specific tool.

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

#39

Post by AlexC04 »

this is really exciting and dovetails really closely with the project I'm working on.

I'm writing a language spec for an LLM runner that has the ability to chain prompts and hooks into workflows.

https://github.com/AlexChesser/ail

I'm writing the tool as proof of the spec. Still very much a pre-alpha phase, but I do have a working POC in that I can specify a series of prompts in my YAML language and execute the chain of commands in a local agent.

One of the "key steps" that I plan on designing is specifically an invocation interceptor. My underlying theory is that we would take whatever random series of prose that our human minds come up with and pass it through a prompt refinement engine:

> Clean up the following prompt in order to convert the user's intent > into a structured prompt optimized for working with an LLM > Be sure to follow appropriate modern standards based on current > prompt engineering reasech. For example, limit the use of persona > assignment in order to reduce hallucinations. > If the user is asking for multiple actions, break the prompt > into appropriate steps (**etc...)

That interceptor would then forward the well structured intent-parsed prompt to the LLM. I could really see a step where we say "take the crap I just said and turn it into CodeSpeak"

What a fantastic tool. I'll definitely do a deep dive into this.

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

#40

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

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.

The idea is this would be a kind of IL for natural language queries. Then the main LLM isn't dependent on quirks of English.
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