[michaelfeathers]

I think we are going to end up with common design/code specification language that we use for prompting and testing. There's always going to be a need to convey the exact semantics of what we want. If not, for AI then for the humans who have to grapple with what is made.

[rerdavies]

Sounds like "Heavy process". "Specifying exact semantics" has been tried and ended up unimaginably badly.

[bcrosby95]

Nah, imagine a programming language optimized for creating specifications.

Feed it to an llm and it implements it. Ideally it can also verify it's solution with your specification code. If LLMs don't gain significantly more general capabilities I could see this happening in the longer term. But it's too early to say.

In a sense the llm turns into a compiler.

[rerdavies]

It's an interesting idea. I get it. Although I wonder.... do you really need formal languages anymore now that we have LLMs that can take natural language specifications as input.

I tried running the idea on a programming task I did yesterday. "Create a dialog to edit the contents of THIS data structure." It did actually produce a dialog that worked the first time. Admitedly a very ugly dialog. But all the fields and labels and controls were there in the right order with the right labels, and were all properly bound to props of a react control, that was grudgingly fit for purpose. I suspect I could have corrected some of the layout issues with supplementary prompts. But it worked. I will do it again, with supplementary prompts next time.

Anyway. I next thought about how I would specify the behavior I wanted. The informal specification would be "Open the Looping dialog. Set Start to 1:00, then open the Timebase dialog. Select "Beats", set the tempo to 120, and press the back button. Verify that the Start text edit now contains "30:1" (the same time expressed in bars and beats). Set it to 10:1,press the back button, and verify that the corresponding "Loop" <description of storage for that data omited for clarity> for the currently selected plugin contains 20.0. I can actually see that working (and I plan to see if I can convince an AI to turn that into test code for me).

Any imaginable formal specification for that would be just grim. In fact, I can't imagine a "formal" specification for that. But a natural language specification seems eminently doable. And even if there were such a formal specification, I am 100% positive that I would be using natural language AI prompts to generate the specifications. Which makes me wonder why anyone needs a formal language for that.

And I can't help thinking that "Write test code for the specifications given in the previous prompt" is something I need to try. How to give my AI tooling to get access to UI controls though....

[michaelfeathers]

That doesn't sound like the sort of problem you'd use it for. I think it would be used for the ~10% of code you have in some applications that are part of the critical core. UI, not so much.

[cess11]

We've had that for a long, long time. Notably RAD-tooling running on XML.

The main lesson has been that it's actually not much of an enabler and the people doing it end up being specialised and rather expensive consultants.

[CamperBob2]

RAD before transformers was like trying to build an iPhone before capacitive multitouch: a total waste of time.

Things are different now.

[cess11]

I'm not so sure. What can you show me that you think would be convincing?

[CamperBob2]

I think there are enough examples of genuine AI-facilitated rapid application development out there already, honestly. I wouldn't have anything to add to the pile, since I'm not a RAD kind of guy.

Disillusionment seems to spring from expecting the model to be a god or a genie instead of a code generator. Some people are always going to be better at using tools than other people are. I don't see that changing, even though the tools themselves are changing radically.