> There seems a fair enthusiasm in the UI of these to hide code from coders. Like the prompt interaction is the true source and the actual code is some sort of annoying intermediate runtime inconvenience to cover up.

I've finally started getting into AI with a coding harness but I've take the opposite approach. usually I have the structure of my code in my mind already and talk to the prompt like I'm pairing with it. while its generating the code, I'm telling it the structure of the code and individual functions. its sped me up quite a lot while I still operate at the level of the code itself. the final output ends up looking like code I'd write minus syntax errors.

The fact that the Codex app is still unavailable on Linux makes me think the target audience isn't people who understand code.

The power to the people is not us the developers and coders.

We know how to do a lot of things, how to automate etc.

A billion people do not know this and probably benefit initially a lot more.

When i did some powerpoint presentation, i browsed around and draged images from the browser to the desktop, than i draged them into powerpoint. My collegue looked at me and was bewildered how fast I did all of that.

Check it out: you can open the repo in vim and compare changes with git, for the coderiest coding experience

I knew a guy who did 6510 and 68000 assembler for many years and had a hard time using higher order languages as well as DSLs. “Only assembler is real code. Everything else is phony, bloat for what can be done way better with a fraction of the C++ memory footprint.”

Well that guy was me and while I still consider HOLs as weird abstractions, they are immensely useful and necessary as well as the best option for the time being.

SQL is the classic example for so called declarative languages. To this day I am puzzled that people consider SQL declarative - for me it is exactly the opposite.

And the rise of LLMs proof my point.

So the moral of the story is, that programming is always about abstractions and that there have been people, who refused to adopt some languages due to a different reference.

The irony is, that I will also miss C like HOLs but Prompt Engineering is not English language but an artificial system that uses English words.

Abstractions build on top of abstractions. For you code is HOL, I still see a compiler that gives you machine code.

Yes, the code is still important. For example, I had tasked Codex to implement function calling in a programming language, and it decided the way to do this was to spin up a brand new sub interpreter on each function call, load a standard library into it, execute the code, destroy the interpreter, and then continue -- despite an already partial and much more efficient solution was already there but in comments. The AI solution "worked", passed all the tests the AI wrote for it, but it was still very very wrong. I had to look at the code to understand it did this. To get it right, you have to either I guess indicate how to implement it, which requires a degree of expertise beyond prompting.

It's reminds me what happened with Frontpage, ultimately people are going to learn the same lesson, there's no replacement for the source code.

Hot take: we (not I, but I reluctantly) will keep calling it code long after there's no code to be seen.

Like we did with phones that nobody phones with.