Hacker News Reader

One hypothesis I have is that the future of programming is natural language and the “compiler” is a LLM. This would be no different from the days when C took over for asm.

View on HN

The difference is that natural language doesn't have a well-defined semantics and is open to interpretation. Programming languages being compiled, on the other hand, have precise, well-defined semantics (excluding UB I guess) that you can formally reason about.

Using an LLM for programming is not like compiling, it's like employing a developer you either have to trust how they may happen to interpret your instructions, or to manually double-check their work.

I understand where you're coming from, but I didn't mean it quite that literally. More like, in the same way that compilers fundamentally changed how we program by adding a layer of (deterministic) abstraction, natural language assisted by AI could add a new (non-deterministic) layer of abstraction to programming.

This was my take on the tech. Ultimately it will need to be prompted. Now the form that prompt takes is open to a bunch of speculation but even if it gets superhuman at producing code or any output it is directionless by itself, for now. We are what direct its ability, which I think is really cool. I think getting good at extracting exact outputs from the LLM will be the new engineer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com