alt Hacker NewsNo it doesn’t get compiled. Compilation is a translation from one formal language to another that can be rigorously modeled and is generally reproducible.
Translating from a natural language spec to code involves a truly massive amount of decision making because it’s ambiguous. For a non trivial program, 2 implementations of the same natural language spec will have thousands of observable differences.
Where we are today, that is agents require guardrails to keep from spinning out, there is no way to let agents work on code autonomously or constantly recompile specs that won’t end up with all of those observable differences constantly shifting, resulting in unusable software.
Tests can’t prevent this because for a test suite to cover all observable behavior, it would need to be more complex than the code. In which case, it wouldn’t be any easier for machine or human to understand. The only solution to this problem is that LLMs get better.
Personally I think at the point they can pull this off, they can do any white collar job, and there’s not point in planning for that future because it results in either Mad Max or Star Trek.
well you have to expand your definition of "compile" a bit. There is clearly a similarity, whether or not you want to call it the same word. Maybe it needs a neologism akin to 'transpiled'.
other than that you seem to be arguing against someone other than me. I certainly agree that agents / existing options would be chaotic hell to use this way. But I think the high-level idea has some potential, independent of that.