alt Hacker News> How much can we trust a system when nobody has experience of building it this way?
If humans are no longer reading the LLM outputs and internalizing the codebase themselves, there's no longer much point to source code. The coding assistant might as well take a natural language prompt and directly hand you an ELF binary that passes a test suite. Are companies ready for that?
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I think some definitely are. Especially if there is a system that sits on top of that and pokes and prods the binary to see if it behaves like it's supposed to.
That's simply not true.
Until spec files can be worked with so efficiently that we can just regenerate the binaries from them for every change, what you said makes little sense.
You're going to need an intermediate portable form of storing the program. It so happens that all the tools and AI are optimized to work with source code.
Gary Tan has said markdown is code. Personally I see my job as establishing the architecture, creating tests, lint rules, etc. for my agents. Monitor the code, but if there's an issue create a new agent that monitors performance, etc.
Exactly! I wouldn’t be surprised if some day in the distant future, that’s where this all goes. Coding languages may in fact be on their way to being dead. You can imagine a world where, regardless the platform, the lowest level instruction format is output.
isnt that kinda like downloading and using software a team you have no knowledge of has produced and released?
All you can go by is 'does it do what it says it does'
I feel like ever since we stopped reading assembly we don't really internalize our codebases.
It's just one "Buy Now" button. How hard could that be? /s
There is a point to source code:
Lots of tools for analysing and debugging it
It can be cross platform - the same source code will run on x86 and ARM, and in many cases on Windows and Linux.
Changes have predictable consequences because compilers and interpreters are deterministic.