Post #820005

2026-03-27 20:29 UTC

I don’t want to describe what I want to a computer in plain English. I want to express it in a formalised language more akin to mathematics than prose. Unambiguous. Logical. Deterministic. Even if describing it in English worked perfectly, and had no other downsides, I’d still hate it. Because I wouldn’t be making it, I’d be product managing it, &amp; I *never* wanted to be a PM. The whole point was to directly make things. To feel the digital clay in my hands. Being a supervisor is not enough.

Replies (4)

@sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-27 20:41

Some people say it’s just like moving from assembly to a higher level language, like the LLM is a compiler. But it’s absolutely not - compilers are still formal language and completely deterministic: you can trust them to produce a known output for a given input, every single time. With such a guarantee, it truly is just an abstraction, a productivity tool with directly analogous characteristics to the thing it is building on top of. You’re still in control, every action has a traceable outcome

Open ##1281767
@RethinkJeff@mastodon.social 2026-03-27 20:35

@sinbad The math is the point!

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@BuschnicK@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-27 21:23

@sinbad relevant: https://www.blackhc.net/essays/future_of_software/

Open ##1281776
@lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-03-28 11:25

@sinbad when i played with stable diffusion, the need for a formal way to define prompts came up very soon. in fact the community started heavily relying on danbooru and score tags to generate images, which is such a formalization. by which i mean to say remove precision, and it will be reinvented.

Open ##1281780