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425 points sfarshid | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.529s | source
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bwestergard ◴[] No.45005722[source]
There are always two major results from any software development process: a change in the code and a change in cognition for the people who wrote the code (whether they did so directly or with an LLM).

Python and Typescript are elaborate formal languages that emerged from a lengthy process of development involving thousands of people around the world over many years. They are non-trivially different, and it's neat that we can port a library from one to the other quasi-automatically.

The difficulty, from an economic perspective, is that the "agent" workflow dramatically alters the cognitive demands during the initial development process. It is plain to see that the developers who prompted an LLM to generate this library will not have the same familiarity with the resulting code that they would have had they written it directly.

For some economic purposes, this altering of cognitive effort, and the dramatic diminution of its duration, probably doesn't matter.

But my hunch is that most of the economic value of code is contingent on there being a set of human beings familiar with the code in a manner that requires writing having written it directly.

Denial of this basic reality was an economic problem even before LLMs: how often did churn in a development team result in a codebase that no one could maintain, undermining the long-term prospects of a firm?

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1. tikhonj ◴[] No.45008527[source]
There's a classic Peter Naur paper about this from 1985: "Programming as Theory Building"

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

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2. metadat ◴[] No.45009075[source]
Discussed 7 months ago (45 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592543

Great read overall, an interesting challenge to the conception that at its core, programming is about producing code.

3. grimgrin ◴[] No.45015078[source]
found a copy that isn't a scanned paper:

https://gist.github.com/dpritchett/fd7115b6f556e40103ef