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I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this, its one of those things that you say because it sounds modern and up to date, and makes for a good sounding blogpost. The actual reality of any of what they're talking about is absolutely terrible

Even just the cost of this would be a disaster, especially once everything goes to token based pricing

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Some people even claim that they don't commit the code into source control, only the prompts. The best part about the internet is that you can publish any random shower thought.

Around 2020 I started getting downvoted for predicting that while the most popular programming languages at the time were Python, Java, and JavaScript, or whatever they were, the most popular programming languages in 2035 would be English and Mandarin.

Looks more like 2030, after all. So the downvoters had a point.

I think having some real examples of this 2035 is a lot more feasible now than it would have looked to most people in 2020, but the majority of projects in 2030 is absurd. Can you name even one piece of software today that is actually built this way?

This means:

Every release, the only thing done is they edit a prompt and then ship the build that comes out of LLM -> CI/CD ?

Then they delete all the source that was generated, along with the context, and only the prompt is carried forward to the next release?

What I'm talking about has only become possible in the last few months. Within a year you'll start to see new products built this way. Within five years you will see very few new products built any other way. Today's source code is tomorrow's object code.

I don't even commit the prompts. I just commit the one prompt which says "do what the customer wants. ask when more information is required."

Been doing it for the past several weeks. It is no longer correct to say that LLMs can't/don't/won't exercise reasonable aesthetic judgement on the finished product. Immense progress in this area has been made recently.

If you want the model to maintain a certain look and feel, or to preserve the UX in other ways, tell it. Even if it doesn't get it 100% right today, the direction of progress is pretty clear, so you might as well get used to prompting the models accordingly.

This doesn't appear to relate to the conversation at all, because we aren't talking about generating entire products. Is this just generic AI advertising?

I'm responding specifically to the GP's point: 'And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask,' and specifically to your rejoinder ('I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this.')

This is simply not the case when working with Fable-class models. Those who persist in believing it are hopefully very close to retirement.

I'm not 'advocating' anything, just stating a fact.

Author here. FWIW, I do this with my Shelley modifications. It works.

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