LLM Inevitabilism

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

"This" does a lot of unjustifiable work here. "This" refers to your successful experience which, I assume, involved a program no larger than a few tens of thousands lines of code, if that, and it saved you only a few hours of work. The future you're referring to, however, is an extrapolation of "this", where a program writes arbitrary programs for us. Is that future inevitable? Possibly, but it's not quite "this", as we can't yet do that, we don't know when we'll be able to, and we don't know that LLMs are what gets us there.

But If we're extrapolating from relatively minor things we can do today to big things we could do in the future, I would say that you're thinking too small. If program X could write program Y for us, for some arbitrary Y, why would we want Y in the first place? If we're dreaming about what may be possible, why would we need any program at all other than X? Saying that that is the inevitable future sounds to me like someone, at the advent of machines, saying that a future where machines automatically clean the streets after our horses is the inevitable future, or perhaps one where we're carried everywhere on conveyor belts. Focusing on LLMs is like such a person saying that in the future, everything will inevitably be powered by steam engines. In the end, horses were replaced wholesale, but not by conveyor belts, and while automation carried on, it wasn't the steam engine that powered most of it.

0: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

Today we see a clear path toward machines that can take on most of the intellectual labor that humans do. Scott Alexander's 2027 time frame seems optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on how you feel about the outcome). But by say 2037? The only way that vision of the future doesn't come true is economic collapse that puts us back to 20th century technology. Focusing on whether the technology is LLMs or diffusion models or whatever is splitting hairs.