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.
We went from Assembly to Fortran, with several languages in between, until C came to be almost 15 years later.
Note that a lot of people also still work in C.
"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?
>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?