-91
do we need documentation in the age of AI?
(thelemmy.club)
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This is literally the retort that moves the goalposts.
I made no claim that LLMs haven't changed, I make the claim that others are making claims that fall apart once examined.
The claims others make:
AI is amazing because now it can make this thing
Oh, the only reason doesn't hold up to scrutiny this one time is because of {insert goal post moving here}.
Argument 1 falls apart when looking inside the product (i.e. the shit sandwich, the slop grenade, etc...).
Argument 2 is circular, so I'm not going to waste time on it.
But just for the sake of argument, lets say there's some sudden release of a model tomorrow that runs one million times better than today's best model and everyone only uses that model from now on. Will I still be handed a shit sandwich?
Yes.
Why?
Because the fact that I'm handed a shit sandwich isn't influenced by how good the model is. It's based on the fact that English is a terrible language for logic.
We discovered this in the 60s and 70s. Computer programming was too hard in the 50s and only getting harder, so everyone got together and tried to make a programming language out of English, that way everyone could do it. That's literally how the Cobol language came to be. It was sold to everyone on the idea that anyone could create something with a fuzzy human readable language called English.
What did we learn? English is both a terrible programming language and a terrible specification language, Non-programmers (managers, general workers, etc...) fall prey to things like the xy problem, understanding gaps, intention gaps, etc... and so can't end up with a new good product by giving orders. The scars of that delusion are still felt in our banking system today. Every lesson learned by Non-programmers in the goal of getting a good program turns them lesson by lesson into programmers, and at that point you're just programming by hand anyway.
The same lessons were rediscovered in the 80s by people trying to program by spreadsheets and GUI-only app builders, the 2010s with the no code movement, it's currently being rediscovered in the 2020s with LLMs, and it'll be rediscovered again by a new generation in the 2040s once those with the experience and learned wisdom of last time retire out of the industry and the few remaining are outnumbered and dismissed as religious zealots.
Literally not moving the goalposts.