[peter_retief]

It is a great analogy.

Also quite like Linus Torvalds likening of AI to a compiler.

He argues that calling AI the "author" of code is the equivalent of saying a compiler wrote your code.

He views AI as an incredibly powerful productivity layer, much like the historic progression from machine code to assemblers, and then to higher-level compilers!

[timothycoleman]

An important difference is the code precisely expresses many behaviours of the program, and a correct compiler guarantees to respect those behaviours.

An AI prompt is not so precise, and an AI offers no such guarantees to respect the behaviours expressed.

This is why the primary artifact of the development process, which we review and version control, is still the code, and not the prompt.

That said, I do think there's a lot of value to be gained by recording and analysing the prompt/response loop behind the code that ends up in a codebase

[permalac]

Shall we be concerned that not many are even able to read assembler code? I'm not talking about reading machine code, produced by the assembler, but the assembler code itself.

Machine code was hard, but one could make it pretty efficient. Not efficiently.

Assembler was still pretty performant, for today's standard it is tip top.

So, moving on 10, 20 years from now, can someone read c++? Even html?

[timothycoleman]

I think whoever is responsible for the correct operation of a software system will still need to read something that precisely describes the behaviours that they care about.

Today, for most devs, thats the code. We usually don't need to look at compiled output, because the code is enough. We can't just look at the prompts, because they aren't precise enough.