[pbohun]

It's not ape coding. It's skill coding. People who don't have the skill to do math and logic ask others to do it for them.

The reason we have programming languages is the same reason we have musical notation or math notation. It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.

We could write music using natural language, but no one does because a single page of music would require dozens of pages of natural language to describe the same thing.

[boomskats]

It's funny that you mention music and notation: sheet music is very compact for musical absolutes like pitch/rhythm/harmony, but a huge part of what we care about with music is nuance, which doesn't reduce cleanly to symbols. Hence there are plenty of words in musical notation that try to describe the desired characteristics of performance, that can't be otherwise encoded into that notation. For example, "with feeling".

That reminds me of an argument on here a while back: where I said I wished Spotify let you filter tracks by presence of pitch-correction or autotune. This wasn't because I thought autotune was 'bad' or modern artists were 'fake', but because sometimes I wanted to listen to vocals as a raw performance - intonation, stability, phrasing - I wanted the option of listening to recordings that let me appreciate the _skill_ possessed by the artists that recorded them.

I got _absolutely destroyed_ in that comments section, with people insisting i'm a snob, that I'm disrespectful, bigoted towards modern artists, there's no way i can actually hear the difference, and if i cant why does it even matter, and anyway everyone uses it now because studio time is expensive and it's so much cheaper than trying to get that perfect take. People got so angry, I got a couple of DMs on Twitter even. All the while I struggled to articulate or justify why I personally value the _skill_ of exceptional raw vocal performance - what I considered to be performance "with feeling".

But, I had to come to terms with the fact that anyone can sing now - no-one can tell the difference, so the skill generally isn't valued any more. Oh, you spent your entire life learning to sing? You studied it? Because you loved music? Sorry dude, I dunno what to say. I guess you'll have to find another way to stand out. You could try losing some weight. Maybe show some skin.

[globular-toast]

Actually, learning to sing was never really valued. Anyone can learn to sing, but for most that means being a backing singer. Being a lead/soloist is more about timbre and presence (including to a not insignificant extent looks). It's something you either have or you don't.

[pmg101]

Self evidently not the case, look at people absolutely falling over themselves to pay hundreds for seats at West End/Broadway shows just to see the spectacle of live human performance.

[justinhj]

This is why I never use a calculator. Since my school days I have the skill to do long division. Why hit the sin button when I have the skill to write out a Taylor series expansion? For many other purposes I have the skill to use Newton Raphson methods to calculate values that mostly work.

Those who use a calculator simply don't have these skills.

[aqua_coder]

There is a notable difference between say, calculating long division through a calculator compared to prompting an AI to calculate the derivative of a simple continuous function. one requires _understanding_ of the function, while the other just skips the understanding and returns the required derivative. One is just a means to skip labor intensive and repetitive actions, while the other is meant to skip the entire point of _why_ you are even calculating in the first place. What is the point of dividing two numbers if you don't even understand the reason behind it ?

[aspenmartin]

I'm not quite sure I understand the logic of this and how people don't see that these claims of "well now everyone is going to be dumber because they don't learn" has been a refrain literally every time a major technological / Industrial Revolution happens. Computers? The internet? Calculators?

The skills we needed before are just no longer as relevant. It doesn't mean the world will get dumber, it will adapt to the new tooling and paradigm that we're in. There are always people who don't like the big paradigm change, who are convinced it's the end of the "right" way to do things, but they always age terribly.

I find I learn an incredible amount from using AI + coding agents. It's a _different_ experience, and I would argue a much more efficient one to understand your craft.

[justinhj]

100%. I have been learning so much faster as the models get better at both understanding the world and how to explain it me at whatever level I am ready for.

Using AI as just a generator is really missing out on a lot.

[rcxdude]

Integration and differentiation, even before LLMs, were already something that you would be better off just getting a machine to do in most cases. It's far more important to understand what the operations represent than it is to derive the exact closed form of the result yourself, because the actual process of doing it is almost always tedious and mechanical and doesn't give you much insight into the equation you are working with.

[RaftPeople]

> This is why I never use a calculator.

I always use the calculator.

But, because the numbers that get returned aren't always the right numbers, I try to approximate the answer in my head or with paper and pencil to kind of make sure it's in the ball park.

Also, sometimes it returns digits that don't actually exist, and it's pretty insistent that the digit is correct. If I catch it early I just re-run the equation but there is a special button where I can tell it that it used a digit that does not actually exist.

Sometimes, for complex ones, it tells me it's trying to calculate and provides some details about how it's going about it and keeps going and going and going, for those ones I just reboot the calculator.

[lioeters]

Solution for a hallucinating calculator: get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one. This message brought to you by a trillion dollars in investment desperately trying to replace the labor force with pseudo-intelligent calculators.

Also, the calculator may refuse to process certain operation deemed to be offensive or against the interest of the corporate-state.

Not to forget, the calculator consumes so much processing power that most people are unable to run it at home, so you need a subscription service to access general-purpose calculation.

[pixl97]

>get a second unreliable calculator to verify the work of the first one

In do or die situations we actually use 3 calculators.

[pbohun]

You probably also don't use a calculator because it uses a scary language called arabic numerals. Why write 123,456 when you could write out in english: One Hundred Twenty-Three Thousand Four Hundred Fifty-Six? English is your programming language and also your math language, right?

[soulofmischief]

I hope this comment is sarcastic.

LLMs are able to ingest numbers. And not just Arabic numerals; Did you know that there are other kinds of number systems?

Believe it or not, they also ingest multimedia. You don't need the English language to talk to a language model. Anything can be a language; you can communicate using only images.

And for that matter, modern LLMs are great at abstract math (and like anything else the results still need proofreading).

[ssivark]

Bad analogy. The things I delegate to a calculator, I'm absolutely sure I understand well (and could debug if need be). These are also very legible skills that are easy to remind myself by re-reading the recipe -- so I'm not too worried about skills "atrophying".

[skeledrew]

Meanwhile those who use a calculator merely hit that sin button and get on with the actual problem at hand, and life in general.

Strongly suspect this is sarcasm, but if it isn't, I applaud your... gusto? Or whatever it is you have going on here.

[pmg101]

It's not sarcasm, it's satire.

[skeledrew]

That's the right word, thanks.

[skeledrew]

> It is a far more concise and precise way of communicating than using natural languages.

No. We have programming languages because reading and writing binary/hexadecimal is extremely painful to nigh on impossible for humans. And over the years we got better and better languages, from Assembly to C to Python, etc. Natural language was always the implicit ultimate goal of creating programming languages, and each step toward it was primarily hindered by the need to ensure correctness. We still aren't quite there yet, but this is pretty close.

[globular-toast]

No, that is not true at all.

Natural language is natural because it's good for communicating with fellow humans. We have ways to express needs, wants, feelings, doubts, ideas etc. It is not at all "natural" to program a computer with the same language because those computers were not part of the development of the language.

Now, if we actually could develop a real natural language for programming that would be interesting. However, currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development. The development of the language is expected to have been done already prior to training.

Invented languages and codes are used everywhere. Chemical nomenclature, tyre sizes, mathematics. We could try to do that stuff in "natural" language, but it would be considered a serious regression. We develop these things because they empower us to think in ways that aren't "natural" and free our minds to focus on the problem at hand.

[skeledrew]

Natural languages are "natural" because they evolved as the de facto way for humans to communicate. Doesn't need to be with fellow humans, but humans were all we've been able to communicate with over our ~300,000 years of existence as a species. And we've done it in thousands of varieties.

> currently LLMs do not participate in natural language development

It's quite literally what LLMs are trained on. You create the core architecture, and then throw terabytes of human-generated text at it until a model that works with said text results. Doesn't matter if it participates in language development or not, it only matters that humans can communicate with it "naturally".

> Invented languages and codes

All languages are invented; the only difference is how conscious and deliberate the process was, which is a function of intended purpose. Just look at Esperanto. Or Valyrian.

[globular-toast]

A natural language is a living thing. Every day each speaker adjusts his model a tiny bit. This has advantages but also some serious disadvantages which is why technical writers are very careful to use only a small subset of the language in their writing.

For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs, but this doesn't exist in the language, so why would it exist in the LLM models? It will never exist, unless we invent it, which is, of course, exactly what programming languages are.

Natural languages are not invented. Written scripts are said to be invented, but nobody says a natural language like English or French is invented. It just happened, naturally, as the name suggests.

If natural language were the end goal then mathematics and music would use it too. There's nothing stopping them.

[skeledrew]

> For true natural language programming we'd need to develop a language for reliably describing programs

We really don't. Eventually we won't even be programming anymore per se. Consider communicating with someone who isn't fluent in any language you know, and vice versa. In the beginning you need to use a pretty restricted vocabulary set so you understand each other, similar to a programming language. But over time as communication continues, that vocabulary set grows and things become increasingly "natural", and it's easier for you to "program" each other.

Same with LLMs. We just need to get to the point where a model has sufficient user context (as it already has all the vocabulary) for effective communication. Like OpenClaw is currently accessing enough context for enough use cases that its popularity is through the roof. Tell it to do something, and as long as it has access to the relevant tools and services, it just gets it done. All naturally.