WYSIWID: A New Way to Code with LLMs
You’re getting this email because you signed up for my low-volume newsletter. I haven’t posted for a while, but have some exciting new things to report.
This post takes a bit of explaining, so to save your inboxes, I’m including only a teaser here, and hope you’ll read the full post on my website.
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts, by email or even better in the concept forum where others can join in the discussion.
Dividing labor with LLMs. As LLMs get better at writing code, it seems inevitable that there will be less work for human programmers. Thomas Dohmke is right that low-level coding skills will matter less and that "the future belongs to developers who can model systems, anticipate edge cases, and translate ambiguity into structure—skills that AI can’t automate."
Dohmke says "We need to teach abstraction, decomposition, and specification not just as pre-coding steps, but as the new coding." As someone who has been teaching these things as the core of coding for a few decades now, influenced by colleagues and my own teachers, I can't disagree with that.
But this "division of labor" viewpoint—the human makes the big, high-level decisions and the LLM fills in the details—may not be the best way to think about AI in coding. First, it ignores the fact that LLM capabilities will undoubtedly improve, so the line between what LLMs can do and what must be left to a human coder is constantly shifting. Second, it assumes that all tasks at a particular level are alike, when in fact some high level design might be amenable to LLMs, and some low level coding may require human skills.
Back to basics. Instead, we might ask: how should we build software so that humans and LLMs can work more effectively together? Most observers realize that the advent of LLMs is going to produce radical changes in software development. What they may not have recognized is how, paradoxically, LLMs will force us to re-adopt classic software engineering principles that we've only paid lip service to in recent years.
Read on here...
Full paper here...