It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things.
"I prompted it like this"
"I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different"
It's not programming. It might be having a pseudo-conversation with a complex system, but it's not programming.
> It's not a programming language if you can't read someone else's code, figure out what it does, figure out what they meant, and debug the difference between those things.
Well I think the article would say that you can diff the documentation, and it's the documentation that is feeding the AI in this new paradigm (which isn't direct prompting).
If the definition of programming is "a process to create sets of instructions that tell a computer how to perform specific tasks" there is nothing in there that requires it to be deterministic at the definition level.
I think I 100% agree with you, and yet the other day I found myself telling someone "Did you know OpenClaw was written Codex and not Claude Code?", and I really think I meant it in the same sense I'd mean a programming language or framework, and I only noticed what I'd said a few minutes later.
How did you come up with this definition?
>"I prompted it like this"
>"I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different"
1:1 reproducibility is much easier in LLMs than in software building pipelines. It's just not guaranteed by major providers because it makes batching less efficient.
All programming achieves the same outcome; requests the OS/machine set aside some memory to hold salient values and mutate those values in-line with mathematical recipe.
Functions like:
updatesUsername(string) returns result
...can be turned into generic functional euphemism
takeStringRtnBool(string) returns bool
...same thing. context can be established by the data passed in, external system interactions (updates user values, inventory of widgets)
as workers SWEs are just obfuscating how repetitive their effort is to people who don't know better
the era of pure data driven systems is arrived. in-line with the push to dump OOP we're dumping irrelevant context in the code altogether: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-driven_programming
> "I gave it the same prompt, and it came out different"
I wrote a program in C and and gave it to gcc. Then I gave the same program to clang and I got a different result.
I guess C code isn't programming.