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by panarky 870 days ago
> the most valuable and useful language ...

Programmers think the most valuable language is a programming language. Therefore, an LLM that can generate quality code in that language should also be extremely valuable.

I'd argue that the most valuable language is the natural language of the organization you're writing code for.

That language is vague and ambiguous, and encapsulates many hidden assumptions about how that organization works.

For example, if the organization is a retailer or a wholesaler, you might ask the LLM to generate SQL to return last month's sales and inventory for each site and product category.

The LLM can query the database system tables and guess which tables have sales transactions and inventory transactions. The LLM can look at foreign key definitions to make a good guess how to join these tables with metadata about items, sites, categories and the calendar.

But will the LLM know that inventory is a stock, and sales is a flow? Will it know it should sum the sales transactions but average the inventory balances, or take just the beginning or ending inventory balance?

Many human engineers struggle to translate ambiguous requests in natural language into code which reflects the assumptions and mechanics of the organization.

An LLM that generates consistently useful code needs a world model of how things work, not just how to write code.

1 comments

That's a very 2023 comment but I have a feeling it won't hold up. Yes natural language communication is and has been a very undervalued skill in software development. LLMs have made the skill even more valuable, but in the end your solution is being written in one or more languages with additional features that are absent from natural languages and a programmer still needs to understand what they are building, in all of its complexity, in order to build solutions of real value. I don't see that changing for a little while. In the meantime, programmers will become better natural language communicators.