[mike_hock]

> moving complexity from the more formal and deterministic world of programming languages to the informal and non-deterministic world of natural language

It's like using a compiler that generates semantically different code every time you run it. Basically like compiling a program that's full of UB but "seems to work" most of the time.

> business sees this as productivity gains

Back to LoC/s as a measure of "productivity."

[somewhatgoated]

> Back to LoC/s as a measure of "productivity."

IMO this doesn’t follow from what OP wrote. I personally measure it with a more abstract “how long does it take me to ship something that is useful in production and solving a real problem” and the increase in speed there has been massive for me. But of course I’m not a bigbrain 10x coder that is doing bleeding edge novel stuff like most people here, so gains might be more obvious for me than for others.

[sdevonoes]

> how long does it take me to ship something that is useful in production and solving a real problem

But that’s only half of the problem. What about “and how easy it is to maintain long-term”. If you say that maintenance can be done via LLM, I would argue that there is zero guarantees that LLMs are backwards compatible and that the markdown you wrote now will work just as fine in 1,2,3 years

[coldtea]

>I would argue that there is zero guarantees that LLMs are backwards compatible and that the markdown you wrote now will work just as fine in 1,2,3 years

That this would be the case is even more guaranteed than some programming language being backwards compatible and the code we wrote working just as fine in 1,2,3, years.

Languages do get non-backwards compatible changes, dependencies break, stuff is deprecated, etc.

But the job of LLMs will remain to generate something from a prompt, and the markdown we wrote, as it's high level and not tied to language versions, APIs, and implementation details, will be just as good a prompt for that in 2050 as it is in 2026.

[cess11]

"Languages do get non-backwards compatible changes, dependencies break, stuff is deprecated, etc."

Sure, but they're deterministic and sometimes you can even do automatic rewrites through AST inspection and writing back to the files instead of scripting string substitutions on them directly.

"But the job of LLMs will remain to generate something from a prompt, and the markdown we wrote, as it's high level and not tied to language versions, APIs, and implementation details, will be just as good a prompt for that in 2050 as it is in 2026."

Your organisation is keeping version control on the LLM:s you use? It's all local, old copies of these databases are kept in secure storage together with the querying and harnessing software?