Post #2189101

2026-04-03 14:53 UTC

@jacob@social.jacobian.org But aren't we then just shifting all the complexity, skill requirement and quality concerns to the business logic specification language, which will maybe be less verbose than code, but certainly not easier to reason about and write perfect specifications in? The maintenance burden of software isn't just high because there's a bug in that manually-written for loop, it's mostly because requirements weren't clear enough or change.

Replies (2)

@rami@chaos.social 2026-04-03 14:55

@jacob@social.jacobian.org I keep coming back to the joke of that one physics professor that in this universe, not only energy, mass, and momentum are conserved, but also complexity. I don't think it was a joke.

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@jacob@social.jacobian.org 2026-04-03 16:47

@rami@chaos.social I mean probably - but also you could say a similar thing about shifting the maintenance burden from assembly to compiled languages, from compiled to interpreted, etc. Higher level abstracts are A Thing, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to imagine an even higher level where we’re specifying whole swaths of applications in a few lines. I guess if you want to be charitable you could say “that’s a prompt!” but the fuzziness and nondeterminism of LLMs make it real hard for me to be charitable.

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