Comment by potholereseller
4 days ago
> The end result of that was that we had to significantly rearchitect the project for us to essentially inject manually crafted code into arbitrary places in the generated code.
This sounds like putting assembly in C code. What was the input language? These two bits ("Not AI generated", "a feature flag") suggest that the code generator didn't have a natural language frontend, but rather a real programming language frontend.
Did you or anyone else inform management that a code generator is essentially a compiler with extra characters? [0] If yes, then what was their response?
I am concerned that your current/past work might have been to build a Compiler-as-a-Service (CaaS). [1] No shade, I'm just concerned that other managers might read all this and then try to build their own CaaS.
[0] Yes, I'm implying that LLMs are compilers. Altman has played us for fools; he's taught a billion people the worst part of programming: fighting the compiler to give you the output you want.
[1] Compiler-as-a-Service is the future our forefathers couldn't imagine warning us about. LLMs are CaaS's; time is a flat circle; where's the exit?; I want off this ride.
The input was a highly structured pdf specification of a family of protocols and formats. Essentially, a real language with very stupid parsing requirements and the occasional typo. The PDF itself was clearly intended for human consumption, but I'm 99% sure that someone somewhere at some point had a machine readable specification that was used to generate most of the PDF. Sadly, no one seems to know where to even start looking for such a thing.
> Did you or anyone else inform management that a code generator is essentially a compiler with extra characters?
The output of the code generator was itself fed into a compiler that we also built; and about half of the codegen team (myself included) were themselves developers for the compiler.
I think management is still scared from the 20 year old M4 monstrosity we are still maintaining because writing a compiler would be "too complex".