Comment by shsush
2 days ago
> it should be as concise as possible
What’s more concise than code? From my experience, by the time I’ve gotten an English with code description accurate enough for an agent I could have done it myself. Typing isn’t a hard part.
LLMs/agents have many other uses, but if you’re not offloading your thinking you’re not really going any faster wrt letting them write code via a prompt.
I find it quite interesting; there seems to be a set of AI enthusiasts who heavily offload thinking onto the LLM. There has to be difference in how they function, as I find as soon as I drift into letting the LLM think for me, productivity plummets.
> What’s more concise than code?
The word "Tetris" is significantly more concise than the source code for Tetris.
"Create a Tetris clone" is a valid four-word prompt. It's not going to produce a perfect one shot, but it'll get you 90% of the way there.
> I could have done it myself. Typing isn’t a hard part.
No, but it is slow. Claude can put together Tetris in 5 minutes. I most definitely cannot.
A traditional programming language still wins there. "git clone $TETRIS_CLONE_REPO" is fewer words, gets you 100% of the way, and only takes seconds to produce the result.
But the topic at hand is about novel problems. Can you describe your novel solution to an LLM in a natural language with less effort than a programming language that is already designed for describing novel solutions as clearly and concisely as possible?
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