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tim33304/03/20256 repliesview on HN

> prefer the coded format. Is is compact...

On the other hand "a folder that syncs files between devices and a server" is probably a lot more compact than the code behind Dropbox. I guess you can have both in parallel - prompts and code.


Replies

ratorx04/03/2025

Let’s say that all of the ambiguities are automatically resolved in a reasonable way.

This is still not enough to let 2 different computers running two different LLMs to produce compatible code right? And no guarantee of compatibility as you refine it more etc. And if you get into the business of specifying the format/protocol, suddenly you have made it much less concise.

So as long as you run the prompt exactly once, it will work, but not necessarily the second time in a compatible way.

show 1 reply
emaro04/03/2025

More compact, but also more ambiguous. I suspect an exact specification what Dropbox does in natural language will not be substantially more compact compared to the code.

delusional04/03/2025

You just cut out half the sentence and responded to one part. Your description is neither well defined nor us it unambiguous.

You can't just pick a singular word out of an argument and argue about that. The argument has a substance, and the substance is not "shorter is better".

cratermoon04/03/2025

What do you mean by "sync"? What happens with conflicts, does the most recent version always win? What is "recent" when clock skew, dst changes, or just flat out incorrect clocks exist? Do you want to track changes to be able to go back to previous versions? At what level of granularity?

scotty7904/03/2025

"syncs" can mean so many different things

xigoi04/03/2025

I’ll bet my entire net worth that you can’t get an LLM exactly recreate Dropbox from this mescription alone.