Yet this is how we communicate with designers and end up with good results.
For example, a project-manager or executive could verbally delegate "make a new registration page for the site" and "needs more rounded corners", either to an AI or to an employee or offshore contractor.
However that's not the same as trying to program exclusively by typing (or dictating) prose to a text-box. ("Page down more. Go to method pee-reg underscore apply. Show me its caller methods. Go to caller method two. Type the following into line 7 position 43...")
There might be some parallels we can draw with the last few decades of "programming business logic will be replaced by drawing diagrams" predictions.
This is exactly it, thanks for putting it down clearly.
Which is also why news of the death of programming as a profession are greatly exagerated. You're not being paid to write code, you're being paid to make decisions. Code is easy, or at least much easier than natural language.
Most of the time, what is being asked for, on its face, is not what is actually wanted, not as simple as spelled out, has some A-B tradeoffs to decide, or maybe not worth it given the side effects.
If a developer isn't asking multiple questions per feature, they deserve to be replaced by an LLM.
(It was very depressing to believe that Software Engineers will lose jobs)
Perhaps worse than the vacillation between getting terrible answers and great answers: When you simply can't tell which kind of answer it is, not until you've sunk a bunch of effort validating or implementing it. (Perhaps finding that the system invented some core fake APIs, non-existent citations, or algebra errors.)
Almost an echo of P/NP categorizations: It's tough when the effort of fully verifying a proposed answer is too close to the effort of just solving it normally.
> Instead of just seeing the entire palette and choosing, you need to say "I want a gold color", "lighter than that" and "darker" and "less like urine" etc.
have meme status among designers, and not in a positive way. Some years ago, when I hanged out with a couple designers, I was introduced to Facebook groups exchanging examples of "briefs" and rework requests. Groups with names like "what the psyche of a graphic designer endures".
Stripped of all the banter, I'd say their complaints are the same as ours: vague requirements coming from people who don't know what they want. And like with software, "good results" come as much in spite of, as thanks to, natural language communication.
At this point I consider the design industry to be cousins or even siblings to the software engineering industry. All those incomprehensible design decisions that pop up in popular software don't come from designers debating faux marx or freud in coffee shops at 3am. They show up from management and other stakeholders who at the 11th hour decide that suddenly everything has to be flat because they read something in a magazine.
The bad decisions are fought by designers tooth and nail and the fact that anything looks halfway descent at all is due to their herculean efforts. If anything they deserve more sympathy than we do because we can always retreat into low level communication protocols or type theory when we need to get the muggles off our backs. But everyone has an opinion on how that button looks.
This comes to mind: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
BTW, quoting from the penultimate panel of that excellent Oatmeal piece (which drives home just how similar are the experiences of designers and programmers):
> You are no longer a web designer. You are now a mouse cursor inside a graphics program which the client can control by speaking, emailing and instant messaging.
This gains a new meaning, or at least becomes an interesting parallel, with LLMs in the picture. Many of us - myself included - already use GPT-4 as, paraphrasing, "a keyboard inside an editor program, which you can control by instant messaging". Ignoring that diffusion models can spit out parts of the design wholesale, someone is bound to eventually hook GPT-4 up to Photoshop or Gimp and get a graphics program you can drive by texting it.
... just remembered, I think someone already did that to Blender, made easy thanks to Blender being able to eat Python code and spit out 3D graphics.
The best incremental search UIs are those that respond near-instantly, and have a stable list of candidates that is (or at least feels like) being filtered, and not like every keystroke re-runs some search from scratch. Prime example, which made me love this UI paradigm, is Foobar2000 - even back in early 2000s, I could have hundreds or thousands of entries in the music library, and then I would type into the magic textbox and watch that huge list (or tree) get instantly trimmed with each keystroke.
You don't have to tell them all that from scratch every time you interact with them.