Posted by alpaylan 13 hours ago
One of the first things I tried to have an llm do is transpile. These days that works really well. You find an interesting project in python, i'm a js guy, boom js version. Very helpful.
You see a business you like, boom competing business.
These are going to turn into business factories.
Anthropic has a business factory. They can make new businesses. Why do they need to sell that at all once it works?
We're focusing on a compiler implementation. Classic engineering mindset. We focus on the neat things that entertain us. But the real story is what these models will actually be doing to create value.
I think this is an interesting development, because we (linguists and logicians in particular) have spent a long time developing a highly specified language that leaves no room for ambiguity. One could say that natural language was considered deficient – and now we are moving in the exact opposite direction.
"This gets to my core point. What changes with LLMs isn’t primarily nondeterminism, unpredictability, or hallucination. It’s that the programming interface is functionally underspecified by default."
This is not really a point about whether LLMs can currently be used as English compilers, but more questioning whether determinism of the final machine code output is a critical property of a build system.
yet nobody complained about this
in fact engineers appreciate that, "we are not replaceable code monkeys cogs in the machine as management would like"
Why? Because new languages have an IR in their compilation path?
>From one gut feeling I derive much consolation: I suspect that machines to be programmed in our native tongues —be it Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili— are as damned difficult to make as they would be to use.
The more I use LLMs, the more I find this true. Haskell made me think for minutes before writing one line of code. Result? I stopped using Haskell and went back to Python because with Py I can "think while I code". The separation of thinking|coding phases in Haskell is what my lazy mind didn't want to tolerate.
Same goes with LLMs. I want the model to "get" what I mean but often times (esp. with Codex) I must be very specific about the project scope and spec. Codex doesn't let me "think while I vibe", because every change is costly and you'd better have a good recovery plan (git?) when Codex goes stray.