Comment by nvader
9 hours ago
Fortunate to be reminded of this right now, especially the pull-quote about conceptual integrity.
This is the reason why AI-assisted programming has not turned out to be the silver bullet we have been hoping for, at least yet. Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight.
I've been thinking a lot about Programming as Theory Building [0] as the missing piece in AI-assisted engineering. Perhaps there are approaches which naturally focus on the essence while ignoring the accidents, but I'm still looking for them. Right now the state of the art I see ignores both accident and essence alike, and degrades the ability to make progress.
Please inform me if there are any approaches you know that work! And lest this sound pessimistic, far from it. This state of affairs is actually intoxicatingly motivating. Feels like we have found silver, and just need to start learning to mould bullets.
[0] Another classic required reading of the industry https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf
This is a good way of putting it. I ship individual features faster, but the end to end process of shipping software has remained the roughly same because the vast majority of my time is building the “theory”.
> Muddled prompting by humans gets you the Homer Simpson car you wished for, that will eventually collapse under its own weight.
Uh-huh. Listen, here's what you're gonna do: log off, log back in and then post the opposite of everything you just said, ok?