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

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

#91
post #25

"Coming soon: Turning Code into Specs" There you have it: Code laundering as a service. I guess we have to avoid Kotlin, too.

I avoid Kotlin as a principal, any language that can't get the type and variable name in the correct order; I avoid them completely.

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

#93

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…

> Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output

So like when you give the same spec to 2 different programmers.

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Models aren't deterministic Is that really true? I haven’t tried to do my own inference since the first Llama models came out years ago, but I am pretty sure it was deterministic: if you fixed the seed and the input was the same, the output of the inference was always exactly the same.

LLMs are not deterministic: 1.) There is typically a temperature setting (even when not exposed, most major providers have stopped exposing it [esp in the TUIs]). 2.) Then, even with the temperature set to 0, it will be almost deterministic but you'll still observe small variations due to the limited precision of float numbers. Edit: thanks for the corrections

Limited precision of float numbers is deterministic. But there's whole parallelism and how things are wired together, your generation may end up on a different hardware etc.

And models I work with (claude,gemini etc) have the temperature parameter when you are using API.

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

#95
post #71

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…

[delete]

Software products specifications are written in real language, not in first order logic.

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

#96
post #66
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) If the result is always provably correct it doesn't matter whether or not it's different at the code level. People interested in systems like this believe that the outcome of what the code does is infinity more important than the co…

The code is what the code does.

The shoe is what the shoe does.

Except one shoe is made by children in a fire-trap sweatshop with no breaks, and the other was made by a well paid adult in good working conditions.

The ends don’t justify the means. The process of making impacts the output in ways that are subtle and important, but even holding the output as a fixed thing - the process of making still matters, at least to the people making it.

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

#99
From what I was able to understand during the interview there, it's not actually a language, more like an orchestrator + pinning of individual generated chunks.

The demo I've briefly seen was very very far from being impressive.

Got rejected, perhaps for some excessive scepticism/overly sharp questions.

My scepticism remains - so far it looks like an orchestrator to me and does not add enough formalism to actually call it a language.

I think that the idea of more formal approach to assisted coding is viable (think: you define data structures and interfaces but don't write function bodies, they are generated, pinned and covered by tests automatically, LLMs can even write TLA+/formal proofs), but I'm kinda sceptical about this particular thing. I think it can be made viable but I have a strong feeling that it won't be hard to reproduce that - I was able to bake something similar in a day with Claude.

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

#100

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…

> Models aren't deterministic - every time you would try to re-apply you'd likely get different output So like when you give the same spec to 2 different programmers.

Except each time you compile your spec you’re re-writing it from scratch with a different programmer.
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