| This is in some ways a circular argument / problem. Because, what does a well-specified formalisation of a problem solution look like? It looks like a programming language. Since COBOL, the dream has been a language which is formalised for computers while being understandable and able to be written by "business users". We've been promised this future by COBOL, Visual Basic, SQL, and many others. And what does the reality look like? It looks like the business users being upset by the fussiness that formalisation adds. That's why Excel is still king. Does adding better visual descriptors of program execution really help communicate solutions? LLMs are actually a great bridge between, "Here's an idea" and "Here's the idea formalised as a set of problem and solution statements". They're really good at it. Claude Sonnet 4.5 will output a dozen pages of formalised steps for solving a problem that acts as a good bridge between the domain expert and the programmer. It makes mistakes. It misunderstands things sometimes. Sometimes it understands things better than the programmer or the domain user, such as when it recently corrected me on my understanding on the OAuth2.0 spec, because I was using a non-standard parameter that Cisco Meraki had mistakenly added to their documentation. |
LLMs are great (sometimes) for conversational editing where there's a fast, iterative back and forth between description, code, clarification and touch-ups, etc. But trying to avoid code entirely eventually makes everything harder, not easier.