alt Hacker NewsAI coding isn’t an abstraction, though. You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it. An abstraction lets you offload cognitive capacity while retaining knowledge of “what you are doing”. With AI coding either you need to carefully review outputs and you aren’t saving any cognitive capacity, or you aren’t looking at the outputs and don’t know what you’re doing, in a very literal sense.
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"You can’t treat a prompt like source code because it will give you a different output every time you use it"
But it seems we are heading there. For simple stuff, if I made a very clear spec - I can be almost sure, that every time I give that prompt to a AI, it will work without error, using the same algorithms. So quality of prompt is more valuable, than the generated code
So either way, this is what I focus my thinking on right now, something that always was important and now with AI even more so - crystal clear language describing what the program should do and how.
That requires enough thinking effort.
> AI coding isn’t an abstraction
Isn't it an abstraction similar to how an engineering or product manager is? Tell the (human or AI coder) what you want, and the coder writes code to fulfill your request. If it's not what you want, have them modify what they've made or start over with a new approach.
It's staggering to me how many times I've heard this argument that LLMs are just the next level of abstraction. Some people are even comparing them to compilers.
Non-determinism is not as much of a problem as the lack of spec. C++ has the C++ norm, Python has its manual. One can refer to it to predict reliably how the program will behave without thinking of the generated assembly. LLMs have no spec.