[gregjor]

The value of software never came from code or the means to produce it. The value always comes from solving problems, increasing efficiency, reducing costs. That happens mainly by gathering and clarifying requirements and setting priorities. The process produces code as an artifact.

That may not seem obvious because programmers often do both jobs, and frequently in a haphazard or incremental fashion, discovering requirements along the way as they iterate on versions of code. We do that because working software very often represents the most complete and unambiguous representation of requirements — we don’t have a better language for describing software. Prompts in English won’t make that better.

Thinking that the best use of LLMs comes from writing more code seems to lack imagination. Why not use AI to solve the business requirements, rather than having it write code? Instead of “write the code for a metrics dashboard” why can’t we just ask the LLM to show us the dashboard? Because LLMs can’t reason or easily integrate real-time raw data into their model. All they can do now amounts to mimicking a human programmer by looking up similar tidbits of code from the training data.

[yubozhao]

Yep. I agree. And that's what I am trying to tell folks. Focus on higher value work.