alt Hacker News>For gosh sakes, start with Claude Shannon's 'noisy channel problem' and consider why the notion of idea -> program is a fallacy.
start with opening up codex or whatever you use. type "make me a calculator app". get your calculator app in an hour or whatever.
it's fair to describe this process as taking an idea and getting a program.
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You can get simple Markov Chain algo to 'write an essay' as well.
It's not an appropriate equivalence because there's too much variation in the outcome that cannot be meaningfully controlled with the same leverage.
If what you were saying were true - there would be 100% not Software Developers anywhere, and Product Managers would be churning out new products daily. But it's not the case.
Because that program already exists.
> type "make me a calculator app". get your calculator app in an hour or whatever.
What sort of 'app'? A native program for given OS and arch? A webapp? What sort of calculator: scientific, graphic, or just a very simple children's calculator? Does it have large buttons optimised for touchscreens/mouse? Or do we optimise UX for user who types with a physical keyboard?
Sure, you can boil any software 'idea' down to a single short sentence, provided your idea was so simple that virtually any output satisfies it. And if virtually any output satisfies your 'idea', what was its value in the first place? Was there not already some FOSS that satisfied the same requirements long before AI came on the scene?
I've found from my vibecoding experiments I always end up needing to define the exact idea so tightly that my prompt length almost matches the final code length. I often find myself 'programming' in some sort of light pseudocode and letting the agent fill out the details. Any higher level and it doesn't really capture what I want - not due to LLM limitations but the ability for the AI to not read my mind.