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English is a Terrible Programming Language—And other reasons AI won’t displace programmers
(orbistertius.substack.com)
Fans of SDF
It's true, but all programs start as natural language at least partly. Clients tell developers what they want, the developers then translate that into something that makes actual sense and is close enough to the request to make the clients happy.
Indeed, it's the job of the programmer to understand that natural language and use it to design a program. The lack of understanding is one thing that worries me about LLMs writing programs.
Like the article mentions, it's only good at boilerplate code at the moment, and can't really do architecture very well. I guess that's why it's "Github Copilot" and not "Github Pilot".
Going forward, who knows? We fundamentally don't understand why LLMs work.