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LLMs as the new high level language

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Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#91

Post by asa400 »

jatora wrote: post #80
asa400 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah the age old 'but humans have heart, and no machine can replicate that' argument. Good luck!

The process of delivering useful, working software for nontrivial problems cannot be reduced to simply emitting machine instructions as text.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#93

Post by runarberg »

hackyhacky wrote: post #85
runarberg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Undefined behavior is a edge case in C. Other programing languages (like JavaScript) goes to great lengths in defining their standards such that it is almost impossible to write code with undefined behavior. By far majority of code written out there has no undefined behavior. I think it is safe to assume that everyone here (except you) are talking about C code without undefined behavior when we mean that the same cod…

Language-based undefined behavior is just one kind of nondeterminism that programmers deal with every day. There are other examples, such as concurrency. So that claim that using LLMs isn't programming because "nondeterminism" makes no sense.

> Language-based undefined behavior is just one kind of nondeterminism that programmers deal with every day.

Every day you say. I program every day, and I have never, in my 20 years of programming, on purpose written in undefined behavior. I think you may be exaggerating a bit here.

I mean, sure, some leet programmers do dabble in the undefined behavior, they may even rely on some compiler bug for some extreme edge case during code golf. Whatever. However it is not uncommon when enough programmers start relying on undefined behavior behaving in a certain way, that it later becomes a part of the standard and is therefor no longer “undefined behavior”.

Like I said in a different thread, I suspect you may be willfully ignorant about this. I suspect you actually know the difference between:

a) written instructions compiled into machine code for the machine to perform, and,

b) output of a statistical model, that may or may not include written instructions of (a).

There are a million reasons to claim (a) is not like (b), the fact that (a) is (mostly; or rather desirably) deterministic, while (b) is stochastic is only one (albeit a very good) reason.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#94

Post by robrenaud »

ekropotin wrote: post #87

IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.

A compiler that can turn cash into improved code without round tripping a human is very cool though. As those steps can get longer and succeed more often in more difficult circumstances, what it means to be a software engineer changes a lot.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#95

Post by hndc »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #89
ekropotin wrote: post #87

IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.

I may have bad news for you on how compilers typically work.

Deterministic compilation, aka reproducible builds, has been a basic software engineering concept and goal for 40+ years. Perhaps you could provide some examples of compilers that produce non-deterministic output along with your bad news.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#96

Post by sarchertech »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #89
ekropotin wrote: post #87

IDK how everyone else feel about it, but a non-deterministic “compiler” is the last thing I need.

I may have bad news for you on how compilers typically work.

The difference is that what most languages compile to is much much more stable than what is produced by running a spec through an LLM.

A language or a library might change the implementation of a sorting algorithm once in a few years. An LLM is likely to do it every time you regenerate the code.

It’s not just a matter of non-determinism either, but about how chaotic LLMs are. Compilers can produce different machine code with slightly different inputs, but it’s nothing compared to how wildly different LLM output is with very small differences in input. Adding a single word to your spec file can cause the final code to be far more unrecognizably different than adding a new line to a C file.

If you are only checking in the spec which is the logical conclusion of “this is the new high level language”, everyone you regenerate your code all of the thousands upon thousands of unspecified implementation details will change.

Oops I didn’t think I needed to specify what going to happen when a user tries to do C before A but after B. Yesterday it didn’t seem to do anything but today it resets their account balance to $0. But after the deployment 5 minutes ago it seems to be fixed.

Sometimes users dragging a box across the screen will see the box disappear behind other boxes. I can’t reproduce it though.

I changed one word in my spec and now there’s an extra 500k LOC to implement a hidden asteroids game on the home page that uses 100% of every visitor’s CPU.

This kind of stuff happens now, but the scale with which it will happen if you actually use LLMs as a high level language is unimaginable. The chaos of all the little unspecified implementation details constantly shifting is just insane to contemplate as user or a maintainer.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#97

Post by idiotsecant »

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…

It turns out that corporations value these things right up until a cheaper almost as good alternative is available.

The writing is on the wall for all white collar work. Not this year or next, but it's coming.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#98

Post by WoodenChair »

The article starts with a philosophically bad analogy in my opinion. C-> Java != Java -> LLM because the intermediate product (the code) changed its form with previous transitions. LLMs still produce the same intermediate product. I expanded on this in a post a couple months back:

https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm....

"The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal of a software development project is to produce robust maintainable source code. The end product is to produce a binary. New programming languages changed the intermediate product. When a team changed from using assembly, to C, to Java, it drastically changed its intermediate product. That came with new tools built around different language ecosystems and different programming paradigms and philosophies. Which in turn came with new ways of refactoring, thinking about software architecture, and working together.

LLMs don’t do that in the same way. The intermediate product of LLMs is still the Java or C or Rust or Python that came before them. English is not the intermediate product, as much as some may say it is. You don’t go prompt->binary. You still go prompt->source code->changes to source code from hand editing or further prompts->binary. It’s a distinction that matters.

Until LLMs are fully autonomous with virtually no human guidance or oversight, source code in existing languages will continue to be the intermediate product. And that means many of the ways that we work together will continue to be the same (how we architect source code, store and review it, collaborate on it, refactor it, etc.) in a way that it wasn’t with prior transitions. These processes are just supercharged and easier because the LLM is supporting us or doing much of the work for us."

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#99

Post by jatora »

asa400 wrote: post #91
jatora wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah the age old 'but humans have heart, and no machine can replicate that' argument. Good luck!

The process of delivering useful, working software for nontrivial problems cannot be reduced to simply emitting machine instructions as text.

Yes, so you need some development and SysOps skills (for now), not all of that other nonsense you mentioned.

Re: LLMs as the new high level language

#100

Post by valenterry »

WoodenChair wrote: post #98

The article starts with a philosophically bad analogy in my opinion. C-> Java != Java -> LLM because the intermediate product (the code) changed its form with previous transitions. LLMs still produce the same intermediate product. I expanded on this in a post a couple months back: https://www.observationalhazard.com/2025/12/c-java-java-llm.... "The intermediate product is the source code itself. The intermediate goal…

What would you say if someone has a project written in, let's say, PureScript and then they use a Java backend to generate/overwrite and also version control Java code. If they claim that this would be a Java project, you would probably disagree right? Seems to me that LLMs are the same thing, that is, if you also store the prompt and everything else to reproduce the same code generation process. Since LLMs can be made deterministic, I don't see why that wouldn't be possible.
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