alt Hacker NewsI'm fine with that. The part that makes it not really an abstraction is, you still deliver code in the end. It'd be different if your deliverable were prompt+conversation, and the code were merely an intermediate build artifact. Usually people throw away the convo. Some have tried making markdown files the deliverable instead, so far that doesn't really work.
It makes even less sense when people compare an LLM to a compiler. Imagine making a pull request that's just adding a binary because you threw the source code away.
The whole field of reproducible builds is only a field because compilers also have had trouble historically of producing binary artifacts with guaranteed provenance and binary compatibility even when built from the same source codes.
If I assign a bug fix ticket to a human developer on my team, I won't be able to precisely replicate how they go about solving the bug but for many bugs I can at least be assured that the bug will get solved, and that I understand the basic approach the assigned dev would use to troubleshoot and resolve the ticket.
This is an organizational abstraction but it's an abstraction just the same, leaky as it is.