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The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

(blog.nilenso.com)
170 points mogambo1 | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 13:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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OptionOfT ◴[18 Sep 25 15:22 UTC] No.45290784[source]▶
And the value of AI as pushed to us by these companies is in doing larger units of work.

But... reviewing code is harder than writing code. Expressing how I want something to be done in natural language is incredibly hard.

So over time I'm spending a lot of energy in those things, and only getting it 80% right.

Not to mention I'm constantly in this highly suspicious mode, trying to pierce through the veil of my own prompt and the code generated, because it's the edge cases that make work hard.

The end result is exhaustion. There is no recharge. Plans are front-loaded, and then you switch to auditing mode.

Whereas with code you front-load a good amount of design, but you can make changes as you go, and since you know your own code the effort to make those are much lower.

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nicce ◴[18 Sep 25 16:35 UTC] No.45291738[source]▶
> Expressing how I want something to be done in natural language is incredibly hard

Surprise, surprise… that is why programming languages were created.

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dragonwriter ◴[18 Sep 25 16:40 UTC] No.45291806[source]▶
Programming languages don’t solve that problem, since someone still has to explain what needs to be done in natural language unless the end customer is also the programmer.

Programming languages were created because of the different problem of “its very hard to get computers to understand natural language even if you know how to express what you want in it”.

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1. nicce ◴[18 Sep 25 16:52 UTC] No.45291960[source]▶
I don't see the difference? Natural language simply was lacking the level of precision. We see natural language words and symbols everywhere in programming languages. Natural language was fine-tuned with improved accuracy. And optimised to reduce the amount of needed words. The difference in the precision between natural languages and programming languages was simply just too big, so you needed "an interpreter" to translate the level of precision from customer to computer.
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2. dragonwriter ◴[18 Sep 25 17:09 UTC] No.45292211[source]▶
Programming languages solve that machine code is hard for humans to work with for large problems and natural language (even when the meaning is perfectly clear) is very difficult (to the point of complete intractability with the level of knowledge and available hardware at the time programming languages were originally invented) to parse mechanically, a necessary first step in translation into machine code a computer could run.

Any problem with the difficulty of clearly expressing things in natural language (a real thing for which there have long been solutions between humans that are different than programming languages) was a problem that was technically unreachable at the user->machine interface because of that more fundamental problem for most of the history of computing (its arguable that LLMs are at the level where now it is potentially an issue with computers, but it took decades of having programming languages to be able to get the technical capacity to even experience the problem, it is not the problem programming languages address.)