[sethev]

Program generation from a spec meant something vastly different in 2007 than it does now. People can and are generating programs from underspecified prompts. Trying to be systematic about how prompts work is a worthwhile area to explore.

[akvadrako]

I don't see how it's different. You could always describe what you want to a team lead or consultant and pay them to build it.

That's still the best way to turn a spec into a program and comes with all the downsides it entails.

[sethev]

Sure, but Joel isn't saying that's impossible or that people who do that are crackpots. In fact, he was an advocate of writing specs ahead of time [1] - for people.

At the time "generating a program from a spec" was an idea floating around that you could come up with a "spec language" that was easier than regular programming languages but somehow still had the same power and could be compiled directly into a program. That's the crackpot idea that Joel is referencing - but that's not what a spec language used with an LLM is doing.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...

[jason_oster]

This is an excellent observation and puts into words something I have barely scratched the surface of. Along with specifications, formal verification is another domain that received the "just automate it" treatment in the before times.

And because formal verification with LLMs is an active area of open research, I have some hope that the old idea of automated formal verification is starting to take shape. There is a lot to talk about here, but I'll leave a link to the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference [1] for those who are interested in where these thoughts originated. It goes deeply into the subject of "specification languages" and other related concepts. My understanding is that the historical split between computing science and software engineering has its roots in this 1968 conference.

[1]: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PD...

[jasfi]

I've built an AI compiler that has my take on this: https://github.com/jfilby/intentcode

[stephbook]

Why don't you simply point your agent to your Jira tickets? It's easier than paying another third party for their magic LLM incantation loop.

[prohobo]

So is that what CodeSpeak does? It formalizes the vocab/structure of prompts?

[ModernMech]

Isn't that how it always goes? First its just the crackpots. Then it's a fringe. Soon it's the way things have always been done.

[redwolf2]

Might look like it, might also just be survivorship bias. Alot of crackpot ideas hit the wall instead of beeing a success. We only notice the successors and might think of them as the default, not the exception.

[ModernMech]

I was commenting from that perspective, basically any thing we consider today to be “the way it’s done” was once something only crazy people did. I think maybe it was pg who said something like if you’re only working on safe things you’ll never have a breakthrough because if breakthroughs came from safe ideas then there would be more of them. I’m not saying every crazy idea changes the world but if you want to change the world you need a crazy idea.