Comment by scribu
7 days ago
“Fill in the gaps by using context” is the hard part.
You can’t pre-bake the context into an LLM because it doesn’t exist yet. It gets created through the endless back-and-forth between programmers, designers, users etc.
7 days ago
“Fill in the gaps by using context” is the hard part.
You can’t pre-bake the context into an LLM because it doesn’t exist yet. It gets created through the endless back-and-forth between programmers, designers, users etc.
But the end result should be a fully-specced design document. That might theoretically be recoverable from a complete program given a sufficiently powerful transformer.
Peter Naur would disagree with you. From "Programming as Theory Building":
A very important consequence of the Theory Building View is that program revival, that is reestablishing the theory of a program merely from the documentation, is strictly impossible. Lest this consequence may seem un- reasonable it may be noted that the need for revival of an entirely dead program probably will rarely arise, since it is hardly conceivable that the revival would be assigned to new programmers without at least some knowledge of the theory had by the original team. Even so the The- ory Building View suggests strongly that program revival should only be attempted in exceptional situations and with full awareness that it is at best costly, and may lead to a revived theory that differs from the one originally had by the program authors and so may contain discrep- ancies with the program text.
The definition of theory used in the article:
a person who has or possesses a theory in this sense knows how to do certain things and in addition can support the actual doing with explanations, justi- fications, and answers to queries, about the activity of concern.
And the main point on how this relate to programming:
- 1 The programmer having the theory of the program can explain how the solution relates to the affairs of the world that it helps to handle. Such an explanation will have to be concerned with the manner in which the af- fairs of the world, both in their overall characteristics and their details, are, in some sense, mapped into the pro- gram text and into any additional documentation.
- 2 The programmer having the theory of the program can explain why each part of the program is what it is, in other words is able to support the actual program text with a justification of some sort. The final basis of the justification is and must always remain the programmer’s direct, intuitive knowledge or estimate.
- 3 The programmer having the theory of the program is able to respond constructively to any demand for a modification of the program so as to support the affairs of the world in a new manner. Designing how a modifi- cation is best incorporated into an established program depends on the perception of the similarity of the new demand with the operational facilities already built into the program. The kind of similarity that has to be per- ceived is one between aspects of the world.