alt Hacker NewsThey are 100% different and yet kind-of-the-same.
They can function kind-of-the-same in the sense that they can both change things written in a higher level language into a lower level language.
100% different in every other way, but for coding in some circumstances if we treat it as a black box, LLMs can turn higher level pseudocode into lower level code (inaccurately), or even transpile.
Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
> Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
But they're not the same at all, except somewhat by their end result, in that they are both ways of transmitting information. That similarity is so vague that comparing them doesn't make sense for any practical purpose. You might as well compare them to smoke signals at that point.
It's the same with LLMs and programming. They're both ways of producing software, but the process of doing that and even the end result is completely different. This entire argument that LLMs are just another level of abstraction is absurd. Low-Code/No-Code tools, traditional code generators, meta programming, etc., are another level of abstraction on top of programming. LLMs generate code via pattern matching and statistics. It couldn't be more different.