> because the crucial change with LLMs is that you don’t use a formal language anymore to specify what you want, and get a deterministic output from that

You don't just code, you also test, and your safety is just as good as your test coverage and depth. Think hard about how to express your code to make it more testable. That is the single way we have now to get back some safety.

But I argue the manual inspection of code and thinking it through in your head is still not strict coding, it is vibe-testing as well, only code backed by tests is not vibe-based. If needed use TLA+ (generated by LLM) to test, or go as deep as necessary to test.

That's not it for me, personally.

I do all of my programming on paper, so keystrokes and formal languages are the fast part. LLMs are just too slow.

its not not about fun. when I'm going through the actual process of writing a function, I think about design issues. about how things are named, about how the errors from this function flow up. about how scheduling is happening. about how memory is managed. I compare the code to my ideal, and this is the time where I realize that my ideal is flawed or incomplete.

I think alot of us dont get everything specced out up front, we see how things fit, and adjust accordingly. most of the really good ideas I've had were not formulated in the abstract, but realizations had in the process of spelling things out.

I have a process, and it works for me. Different people certainly have other ones, and other goals. But maybe stop telling me that instead of interacting with the compiler directly its absolutely necessary that instead I describe what I want to a well meaning idiot, and patiently correct them, even though they are going to forget everything I just said in a moment.