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LLMs as the new high level language

federicopereiro.com

41–50 of 396 posts

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#41
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 us…

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Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

The output will conform to the standard & it will be semantically equivalent. You're making several category errors w/ your comparison.

> You're making several category errors w/ your comparison.

I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#43
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.

How did you come up with this definition?

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is no error on the compiler implementation and no undefined behavior the resulting program is equivalent and the few differences are mostly just implementation defined stuff which are left to the compiler to decide (but often gcc and clang do the same). The performance might differ also. It’s clearly not comparable to the many differences you can get from LLM’s output.

It just depends what level of abstraction you're willing to pretend doesn't matter. gcc and clang produce different assembly code, but it "does the same thing," for certain definitions of "same" and "thing." Claude and Gemini produce different Rust code, but it "does the same thing," for certain definitions of "same" and "thing." The issue is that the ultimate beneficiary of AI is the business owner. He's not a progr…

It has to stop somewhere. Business owner can also hire a different company to create the product and get a result different by as little as 5% performance difference or something with clearly inferior maintainability and UX. You'd hardly argue that it's 'the same' when they followed the same spec, which will never be fully precise at the business level. I agree that talking to an LLM is akin to using the business oriented logic at the module or even function level.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#45
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the prompt wasn't fed to another LLM , but to the same one. "I wrote a program in C and gave it to GCC. Then I gave the same program to GCC again and I got a different result" would be more like it.

> Then I gave the same program to GCC again and I got a different result" would be more like it. This is a completely realistic scenario, given variance between compiler output based on optimization level, target architecture, and version. Sure, LLMs are non-deterministic, but that doesn't matter if you never look at the code.

Optimization level, target architecture, etc are just information fed to the compiler. If it’s still nondeterministic with everything kept the same your compiler is broken.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The output will conform to the standard & it will be semantically equivalent. You're making several category errors w/ your comparison.

> You're making several category errors w/ your comparison. I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters.

I think you are b/c you lack actual understanding of how compilers work & what it would mean to compile the same C code w/ two different conformant C compilers & get semantically different results.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#47
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.

[deleted]

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#48
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is the AI. It's already handling complex issues and debugging solely by gathering its own context, doing major refactors successfully, and doing feature design work. The people that will be held responsible will be the product owners, but it won't be for bugs, it will be for business impact. My point is that SWEs are living on a prayer that AI will be perched on a knifes edge where there is still be some a…

And what happens when the AI can't figure it out?

Same situation as when an engineer can't figure something out, they translate the problem into human terms for a product person, and the product person makes a high level decision that allows working around the problem.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The output will conform to the standard & it will be semantically equivalent. You're making several category errors w/ your comparison.

> You're making several category errors w/ your comparison. I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters.

> I don't think I am. If you ask an LLM for a burger web site, you will get a burger web site. That's the only category that matters.

If one burger website generated uses PHP and the other is plain javascript, which completely changes the way the website has to be hosted--this category matters quite a bit, no?

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what I'm seeing is that all of the skills that my training and years of experience have helped me hone are now implemented by these tools to the level that I know most businesses would be satisfied by. So when things break or they have to make changes, and the AI gets lost down a rabbit hole, who is held accountable?

The answer is the AI. It's already handling complex issues and debugging solely by gathering its own context, doing major refactors successfully, and doing feature design work. The people that will be held responsible will be the product owners, but it won't be for bugs, it will be for business impact. My point is that SWEs are living on a prayer that AI will be perched on a knifes edge where there is still be some a…

I work in the green energy industry and we see it a lot now. Two years ago the business would've had to either buy a bunch of bad "standard" systems which didn't really fit, or wait for their challengs to be prioritised enough for some of our programmers. Today 80-90% of the software which is produced in our organisation isn't even seen by our programmers. It's build by LLM's in the hands of various technically inclined employees who make it work. Sometimes some of it scales up a bit that our programmers get involved, but for the most part, the quality matters very little. Sure I could write software that does the same faster and with much less compute, but when the compute is $5 a year I'd have to write it rather fast to make up for the cost of my time.

I make it sound like I agree with you, and I do to an extend. Hell, I'd want my kids to be plumbers or similar where I would've wanted them to go to an university a couple of years ago. With that said. I still haven't seen anything from AI's to convince me that you don't need computer science. To put it bluntly, you don't need software engineering to write software, until you do. A lot of the AI produced software doesn't scale, and none of our agents have been remotely capable of making quality and secure code even in the hands of experienced programmers. We've not seen any form of changes over the past two years either.

Of course this doesn't mean you're wrong either. Because we're going to need a lot less programmers regardless. We need the people who know how computers work, but in my country that is a fraction of the total IT worker pool available. In many CS educations they're not even taught how a CPU or memory functions. They are instead taught design patterns, OOP and clean architecture. Which are great when humans are maintaining code, but even small abstractions will cause l1-3 cache failures. Which doesn't matter, until it does.

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