alt Hacker NewsIf LLMs stopped improving today I’m sure you would be correct- as it is I think it’s very hard to predict what the future holds and where the advancements take us.
I don’t see a particularly good reason why LLMs wouldn’t be able to do most programming tasks, with the limitation being our ability to specify the problem sufficiently well.
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LLM capability improvement is hitting a plateau with recent advancements mostly relying on accessing context locally (RAG), or remotely (MCP), with a lot of extra tokens (read: drinking water and energy), being spent prompting models for "reasoning". Foundation-wise, observed improvements are incremental, not exponential.
> able to do most programming tasks, with the limitation being our ability to specify the problem sufficiently well
We've spent 80 years trying to figure that out. I'm not sure why anyone would think we're going to crack this one anytime in the next few years.
> the limitation being our ability to specify the problem sufficiently well
Such has always been the largest issue with software development projects, IMO.
I feel like we’ve been hearing this for 4 years now. The improvements to programming (IME) haven’t come from improved models, they’ve come from agents, tooling, and environment integrations.