This is why it’s unlikely these systems will effectively replace software development. By the time you’ve specified the novel system you want to build well enough in English such that you get exactly the system you want you might as well have written the code.
Yep. To put it another way: In a scenario where you want to say something, you can’t outsource what you want to say to anyone. It doesn’t matter whether or not you want to say it in code or if you want to say it in English.
I can describe a novel physics model for a video game. I can do a refresher on concepts like friction, air resistance, gravity, etc. that I don't remember well from school. Then I can describe the constraints and generate code to satisfy it.
If I were to go and learn the physics really in depth and then code it myself, it would take 10x longer.
The comparison is to use a physics library. Only in the LLM case are you trying to write the physics engine yourself. And if its not the kind of physics that's in a library, yes, you will need to learn it to ship a game.
Well… you’re forgetting the part where you can cut out the middleman. Currently a leader has to ask an engineer to build a system, and has to communicate effectively with the engineer until all of the novel details have been ironed out in the specification, and _y_ the engineer builds it.
In a world where the LLM can do the building, the engineer is no longer required.
More often than not, the building is the easy part once the specifics are ironed out.
In my experience, an ideas leader (you know the type) will fail at telling a machine exactly what to do and get bored with the inevitable edge cases, computers saying no, and non-ideas drudgery. This is where I believe every no-code and low-code and WYSIWYG platform and now LLMs fall apart.
A major aspect of programming is translating the messy meatspace to something an extremely fast moron (a computer and I wish I coined this term) understands. And as much of a step change LLMs for writing code are, I have yet to see them take this step.
They've tried this before and they made COBOL. Turns out you still need programmers to write COBOL because it's still programming even if the program looks Englishy.
