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bitwizelast Sunday at 4:00 AM0 repliesview on HN

The HLL-to-LLM switch is fundamentally different to the assembler-to-HLL switch. With HLLs, there is a transparent homomorphism between the input program and the instructions executed by the CPU. We exploit this property to write programs in HLLs with precision and awareness of what, exactly, is going on, even if we occasionally do sometimes have to drop to ASM because all abstractions are leaky. The relation between an LLM prompt and the instructions actually executed is neither transparent nor a homomorphism. It's not an abstraction in the same sense that an HLL implementation is. It requires a fundamental shift in thinking. This is why I say "stop thinking like a programmer and start thinking like a business person" when people have trouble coding with LLMs. You have to be a whole lot more people-oriented and worry less about all the technical details, because trying to prompt an LLM with anywhere near the precision of using an HLL is just an exercise in frustration. But if you focus on the big picture, the need that you want your program to fill, LLMs can be a tremendous force multiplier in terms of getting you there.