Yet another Hacker News

14 points aaronbrethorst 1 hour ago 9 comments

Kalanos 44 minutes ago | parent

python instructions are more succinct than english

orthogonal_cube 41 minutes ago | parent

No. Prompting is Project Management. You’re setting expectations for what you want and waiting to see what the model provides. You may be learning to articulate things well enough for the specific model you’ve chosen to produce the output you want, but it’s not programming. Only when you manipulate the code is it programming.

t-writescode 38 minutes ago | parent

What role would you assign the “going over the new code with a fine-toothed comb and fixing all of the garbage it’s made, but doing so by talking it through where you’re seeing complexity, asking it to review for that same complexity throughout the rest of its change, etc”?

jesse_dot_id 34 minutes ago | parent

It's pair programming. It's definitely not project management because, to build anything useful, I need to know everything I needed to know as a software engineer before AI hit the mainstream. A PM who isn't an experienced engineer could probably come up with the bones of an app, but the app would suck.

Programming as I remember it pre-AI was essentially just toil and iteration. Programming with AI is nearly zero toil and iteration. The first prompt is like installing a framework. The next 200 prompts are programming.

marcus_holmes 33 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, kinda, I guess. It's different from Project Management though, because a lot of that was also managing people and expectations (both the stakeholders and the team).

Writing a really good skill, or a spec document, feels more like programming than Project Management.

t-writescode 40 minutes ago | parent

I’ll buy this. I get a lot more out of the code when I ask it to do things in steps.

Though I absolutely still have to go through it robustly to protect against Claudisms, comments only Claude understands, function names that make sense only with maximum context and a dictionary of that same context, etc. and it still overlaps function responsibility.

I’m not out of a job yet! Hah.

whateveracct 39 minutes ago | parent

do prompts fall under curry-howard isomorphism? somehow even less than bash, maybe lol

marcus_holmes 36 minutes ago | parent

This really resonated with me. My co-founder is a really smart man who cannot get good results out of LLMs. I haven't really gone into it with him in any detail, but his experience is like the academic in TFA; it just doesn't do what he wants it to do.

I'll send him the article and see if a crash-course in "this is how programmers think about problems" helps.

proc0 16 minutes ago | parent

The reason it's not programming is because the AI has several layers of indirection that take ambiguous descriptions and iterates on them in a similar way a human would before writing the code itself. These layers of indirection are not computer specifications.

Programming entails specific instructions and a high level of control, a.k.a. specifications. Of course, there are other kinds of specs, like business specs, but here we're talking about specs in the literal sense, where you are being specific of how the machine should work in a predictive sense. We don't do this with prompts, and we expect the AI to do this for us in the same way we expect a human engineer to take ambiguous directions and turn it into the actual computer spec.

The fact that domain knowledge makes for better prompts is a shortcoming of AI instead of a feature of prompting.