logoalt Hacker News

matheus-rryesterday at 9:40 AM4 repliesview on HN

The intermediate product argument is the strongest point in this thread. When we went from assembly to C, the debugging experience changed fundamentally. When we went from C to Java, how we thought about memory changed. With LLMs, I'm still debugging the same TypeScript and Python I was before.

The generation step changed. The maintenance step didn't. And most codebases spend 90% of their life in maintenance mode.

The real test of whether prompts become a "language" is whether they become versioned, reviewed artifacts that teams commit to repos. Right now they're closer to Slack messages than source files. Until prompt-to-binary is reliable enough that nobody reads the intermediate code, the analogy doesn't hold.


Replies

andaiyesterday at 1:31 PM

>With LLMs, I'm still debugging the same TypeScript and Python I was before.

Aren't you telling Claude/Codex to debug it for you?

pjmlpyesterday at 10:46 AM

We went from Assembly to Fortran, with several languages in between, until C came to be almost 15 years later.

surajrmalyesterday at 3:19 PM

Note that a lot of people also still work in C.

BudapestMemorayesterday at 9:58 AM

"Until prompt-to-binary is reliable enough that nobody reads the intermediate code, the analogy doesn't hold."

1. OK, let's create 100 instances of prompt under the hood, 1-2 will hallucinate, 3-5 will produce something different from 90% of remaining, and it can compile based on 90% of answers

2. computer memory is also not 100% reliable , but we live with it somehow without man-in-the-middle manually check layer?

show 2 replies