alt Hacker NewsGreat article. I'm not sure the author is correct - but I think something is happening to the adage:
> A sufficiently detailed specification is runnable code.
In a way I think LLMs will enable the dream of 4gl and "sufficiently smart compilers"[c].
LLMs aren't smart, but they are capable. Especially capable of translation and transformation.
I can certainly see them help move the abstraction horizon at which we work - so that rigid high level descriptions of the desired logic/process along with the process for quality testing - become the relevant curated artifacts - and the generated go/rust/java/python/etc code become incidental and mutable; subject to constant rewriting as part of the deployment of systems.
[c] You know, the ones that take naive C/C++ and produce executables that fully leverage RISC/EPIC platforms to be better than CISC. See also: Intel Itanium
This is what Anthropic did with agents and $20k to write a C compiler that survived gcc’s torture suite. But the LLM knew:
1. What a C compiler was
2. What a C compiler looked like
3. What the C compiler had to do at runtime to pass gcc’s torture suite through some sort of collaborative iteration (compile, run, did it get stuck at some torture suite test or fail?)
Remove 1 and 2, or replace it with imperfect business logic, and you’re left with a system that is built to _only_ pass the tests you supply it, or in the most extreme case, print(“unit and functional tests pass!”)