Post #1541261
2025-11-15 11:14 UTC
But now we have LLMs, and they actually are (mostly) capable of taking unstructured English text and divining, if not the *correct* meaning, then at least a plausible meaning
But therein lies the problem. Traditional parsers are very good at detecting ambiguous or invalid input, but very bad at guessing what might have been meant
LLMs on the other hand are great at guessing what you might have meant, but not at detecting ambiguity, so as a consequence they tend to mask any bugs in the input
Replies (1)
-
@nicklockwood@mastodon.social 2025-11-15 11:14
The job of a programmer is to identify ambiguities and make decisions about the correct thing to do High level DSLs make programming easier because they eliminate ambiguity by baking in sensible, deterministic, domain-appropriate decisions, so the programmer doesn't have to make them LLMs make programming easier by YOLOing all those decisions in a semi-random fashion so the programmer isn't even aware that a decision had to be made at all