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448 points nimbleplum40 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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01100011 ◴[] No.43566393[source]
People are sticking up for LLMs here and that's cool.

I wonder, what if you did the opposite? Take a project of moderate complexity and convert it from code back to natural language using your favorite LLM. Does it provide you with a reasonable description of the behavior and requirements encoded in the source code without losing enough detail to recreate the program? Do you find the resulting natural language description is easier to reason about?

I think there's a reason most of the vibe-coded applications we see people demonstrate are rather simple. There is a level of complexity and precision that is hard to manage. Sure, you can define it in plain english, but is the resulting description extensible, understandable, or more descriptive than a precise language? I think there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.

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nsonha ◴[] No.43568163[source]
isn't that just copilot "explain", one of the earliest copilot capabilities. It's definitely helpful to understand new codebases at a high level

> there is a reason why legalese is not plain English, and it goes beyond mere gatekeeping.

unfortunately they're not in any kind of formal language either

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still_grokking ◴[] No.43568900[source]
> isn't that just copilot "explain", one of the earliest copilot capabilities. It's definitely helpful to understand new codebases at a high level

In my experience this function is quite useless. It will just repeat the code in plain English. It will not explain it.

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1. kfajdsl ◴[] No.43572092[source]
Haven’t tried copilot but cursor is pretty good at telling me where things are and explaining the high level architecture of medium-largeish codebases, especially if I already vaguely know what I’m looking for. I use this a lot when I need to change some behavior of an open source project that I’m using but previously haven’t touched.