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by dukeyukey 44 days ago
If you already know what the inputs/outputs are, why should you spend days or weeks of your life typing it out rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form to an LLM to get it done a hundred times faster?
5 comments

Because it’s rarely so black and white. Knowing the inputs and outputs is merely the first steps, you need to think about the transitions too as they have their own costs.

Those costs don’t disappear and it’s truly naive to think they don’t matter. Take security issues, they may arise because what you thinks was the input is merely a subset of the true input range. And the extra possibilities lead to unforeseen behavior.

A lot of programming is about ensuring that the input and the output are the sets defined in the specs. And the rest is that the transition/relation is the right tradeoffs of performance, correctness, and costs.

The behavior of an LLM is not and cannot be “well-specified”.
Libraries like Guidance guarantee that the output of an LLM will be syntactically correct (i.e. it will be valid JSON or whatever output format you are wanting). They do not, and fundamentally cannot guarantee that the data contained in them is actually correct, and cannot make the actual behavior of the LLM "well-specified". Or, as you put it, trumps voice wrong.
Because the LLM version will have countless number of bugs and security holes, which means you will spend weeks or months of your life fixing them.
This is a truth that many are having a hard time accepting. Getting shoved into the light so fast is blinding.
We understand what you’re claiming, we just think that you are wrong.
>rather than giving it in a well-specified and tested form

So, code?