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Comment by convolvatron

3 hours ago

more importantly those abstractions were designed to try to make it easier to reason about what was going on for the author, build additional internal abstractions and to allow a reader to follow along and gain an understand of the structure. unless we believe that we can completely punt on having agency over the codebase, then llm code is only as valuable as it is readable.

The dream is that we keep agency, but also give up on reading code, by doing away with code as our level of abstraction and instead having humans edit human-readable spec files (including, say, depicting UIs directly with visual mocks). Like "no code" platforms, but for everything.

  • If by "human readable" you mean written in natural language, then those spec files will have ambiguities and imprecisions. If you make the spec precise and unambiguous enough, then it essentially just becomes a program written in code.

  • >The dream is that we keep agency, but also give up on reading code, by doing away with code as our level of abstraction and instead having humans edit human-readable spec files (including, say, depicting UIs directly with visual mocks). Like "no code" platforms, but for everything.

    Human language is famously terrible at being unambiguous.

    • That's ok if you and the AI are on the same page. And it is possible to write more rigorous natural language, e.g. laws are written in human languages, and yet judges and lawyers agree on how to interpret most of them and there's a defined arbitration process to resolve any new ambiguities.