Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen
remy.wang
remy.wang
For those who want to get to the translation quicker. IMO, its a bit unfair to hold the meaning of the title and the thesis of the whole blogpost as late as the 7th paragraph.
But then I thought about everyone else and offered the translation, then edited after I realized you covered it later.
It's an overall interesting blog post but just a minor quibble from me all else considered. Keep up the good writing.
I want to believe this is true. But as an counterexample, do we need to hold machine code or assembly, generated from our C or Golang programs, in our heads? Or rather the Golang code is a high-level abstraction which is good enough?
If that's the case, does it mean we should go even further and treat design docs as the code suitable to hold in head and treat Golang program as a derivative? Or maybe design docs are also too low-level and the general vibe "create me an app, make no mistakes" is actually enough?
What's the right abstraction level? How to find it?
In computing, though, the halting problem hoses us every time we have to hit ctrl-c to break an accidental infinite loop. Our tools can't always flag those situations ahead of time, so we often have to find them the hard way.
It seems clear that in software development, the specification is the program. To the extent there's something that the spec doesn't cover, that's a bug in the spec, not in the AI that turns the spec into code. Just as you wouldn't blame a compiler for your infinite loop, we will eventually reach the point where blaming a clanker for generating imperfect high-level code sounds just as bogus.
"Build me a Super Mario Bros. clone, make no mistakes" is the new hello_world.c. For anything innovative -- anything with commercial value -- the spec will have to be a lot more elaborate. There are plenty of specs that are already too complex for any one person to hold in their head, except perhaps for a few godlike prodigies. Look at the MPEG-4 document collection, or for that matter our tax and legal systems. I think the lesson is that language alone can't save us from complexity, any more than a better set of axioms can save us from incompleteness.
To find the right position in this spectrum, I think we need to find a level of specification that we care about.
No, the source is enough, because the low-level assembly is translated from the high-level source descriptions (a sound programming language with a complete and consistent specification) via a deterministic algorithmic translation process (a compiler) to a low-level executable that can run on a machine. Today, compilers are complex, but still human understandable. The programs are equivalent, and we're getting better able to actually prove this.
This is why I bristle when people say "post your prompts". Your prompts are not a program and the magic box is not a compiler.
Too many people abandoning everything, either due to laziness, mental overload, or..."skill issues".
I still want to see code. I want write code, check code, optimize and refactor code. I don't want to spend a lot of time debugging, but maybe a little.
The clankers should be accelerating the parts of the process we are bad at, and that takes time we won't spend: long, time-consuming refactors, debugging deep issues, writing crap tons of tests, investigating performance issues, digesting other people's code.
AI should be more like a bicycle than a cruise ship. And I mean the "bicycle for the mind" that Jobs wanted.
i use a compiler and not an LLM because the compiler is deterministic. i can trust that the same code input will always (for the same version of the compiler) produce the same machine code as output. the LLM will not.
And that doesn't even include the particular problems of "centralized" social media, where some oligarchs control which posts go up and which go down.
If you expect any particularly clever reaction from that society, for anything, you'll be quite disappointed. If you want that your friends constantly bug you with what they found on Instatoktube (a.k.a. 'indirect influencers') and not much more beyond that, this is absolutely what society can give you, though.