alt Hacker NewsWhy not? Given a proper spec, you should absolutely be able to one-shot Excel, particularly if we put it at the level of complexity of, say, Excel 1.0 for Mac.
Current models aren't capable of that, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.
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Seems like this would be a good time to use this famous quote:
> given the sufficiently smart compiler
For those unaware, this is a similar quote used by compiler proponents. The first full compiler was created in 1957 (+/- 70 years ago) and the "sufficiently smart compiler" never happened, hand written code from the best coders still is faster. Now, that doesn't mean that compilers didn't do the job well enough, we just accepted that 90-95% of the top speed was enough for almost everything.
To the LLM one shotting point, it took 30 (40?) years for compilers to be good enough for the mass market. Caveat early adopter and investor.
Plus what pyrale said.
The issue is not the models, the issue is that this method ws tried before, and humans suck at writing what they want. Developing in small increments allowing feedback was an answer to this issue.
If you made models able to code to long spec, you would be left with the hard issue of having to write them.