Comment by poisonborz

No, it's actually much, much harder unless you are ignoring any of the details, which are the things that actually matter ultimately. When you were first learning did they not do the "tell me how to make a PB+J sandwich" or whatever to show you the imprecision of plain human words? You may comprehend the LLM I/O easily, but you don't know that that matches what's actually happening.

It's like saying who likes to ride a bicycle in the world of cars, you can do it much easier with a plain steering wheel.

Well... sure it's more efficient (although in some cities and certain routes it's not; same with coding and LLMs). But some of us just love riding the bicycle and enjoying the nature, you know. Perhaps even strengthening our muscles as we do it, as a healthy side effect.

> but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate

Part of the skill and joy of programming is to constantly work on improving my ability 'to comprehend and express cleanly' my intent in code.

I'd argue LLMs are anything but consistent.

I definitely comprehend coding language better/faster when I want to fully understand a program. I usually skip docs and go to the sources when possible. I think it's deeper than just the code though, the biggest thing I haven't seen in using natural language is good organization to express the program.

I think the premise is that yes, you can do that. However many don’t and many in larger corps are pushed expressly to not work that way.

> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.

Not really? In my experience, to get anything precise done, you have to fight the LLM every step of the way. And then when you come back after a few days, you realize that it has overwritten the carefully crafted code or data structures.

> But you can still do that, much easier, with plain human words.

Skill issue.