Comment by skydhash

Code is formal and there are basic axioms that grounds its semantic. You can build great constructs on top of those semantics, but you can’t strip away their formality without the whole thing being meaningless. And if you can formalize a statement well enough to remove all ambiguity, then it will turn into code.

Programming is taking ambiguous specs and turning them into formal programs. It’s clerical work, taking each terms of the specs and each statements, ensuring that they have a single definition and then write that definition with a programming language. The hard work here is finding that definition and ensuring that it’s singular across the specs.

Software Engineering is ensuring that programming is sustainable. Specs rarely stay static and are often full of unknowns. So you research those unknowns and try to keep the cost of changing the code (to match the new version of the specs) low. The former is where I spend the majority of my time. The latter is why I write code that not necessary right now or in a way that doesn’t matter to the computer so that I can be flexible in the future.

While both activities are closely related, they’re not the same. Using LLM to formalize statements is gambling. And if your statement is already formal, what you want is a DSL or a library. Using LLM for research can help, but mostly as a stepping stone for the real research (to eliminate hallucinations).