[doug_durham]

Up until now large software systems required thousands of hours of work and efforts of bright engineers. We take established code as something to be preserved because it embeds so my knowledge and took so long to develop. If it rots then it takes too long to repair or never gets repaired.

Imagine a future where the prompts become the precious artifact. That we regularly `rm -rf *` the entire code base and regenerate it with the original prompts perhaps when a better model becomes available. We stop fretting about code structure or hygiene because it won't be maintained by developers. Code is written for readability and audibility. So instead of finding the right abstractions that allow the problem to be elegantly implemented the focus is on allowing people to read the code to audit that it does what it says it does. No DSLs just plain readable code.

[wiether]

I can imagine that, but... given your prompt(s?) will need to contain all your business rules, someone will have to write prompt(s?) in a way that make it possible for the AI to produce something that works with all the requirements.

Because if you let every stakeholder add their requirements to the prompts, without checking that it doesn't contradict others, you'll end up with a disaster.

So you need someone able to gather all the requirements and translate it in a way that the machine (the AI) can interpret to produce the expected result (a ephemeral codebase).

Which means you now have to carefully maintain your prompts to be certain about the outcome.

But if you still need someone to fix the codebase later in the process, you need people with two sets of skills (prompts and coding) when, with the old model, you only needed coding skills.