https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666
“This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over. Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That’s not to say SWEs don’t have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.” — Ryan Dahl

Interesting words from Ryan Dahl, who I consider a living legend. I have two objections:

1. What if code is no longer writing “syntax”? What if code can be as readable as natural language?
2. How are we supposed to review code if we don’t write it? Can you be an editor without being a writer? I don’t buy it. I buy that a compiler can generate machine code that I don’t have to look at, because the compiler writers probably did a good job on that and the algorithms should be deterministic. But not review what LLMs do amount to not understanding my system and letting it be created by a nondeterministic process.

But Ryan has a strong point and he makes me wonder. Can we consider LLMs to be compilers of natural language descriptions of systems? I don’t know. And I admit I might not even want to know. But I’ll have to find out anyway.