alt Hacker NewsI clearly identify with the problem the author raises, which is: the bottleneck is understanding.
I don't go along with their mitigations though.
In programming we have one tool for this: abstraction. Decomposition, pattern recognition, even data structures and algorithms are all down stream of abstraction. Collectively, we've never truly mastered abstraction, but it's what we have and we collectively wield it well enough that it's usually somewhat effective.
We are in dire need of a better abstraction.
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repelsteeltje • today at 1:03 PM
Yes. And indeed, abstraction is not what LLMs are offering.
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The "right" abstraction seems like quite an art. Sometimes it's not obvious, or it takes multiple rounds of exploration and testing (I'm thinking here of the mental shift moving from HTML + JS, via jQuery, Backbone, Knockout and up to React/Vue or Angular). At all points, we thought we had reasonable abstractions for a while. Vue and Svelt, or NextJS, now are so far from the mental model of early 00s "DHTML".
And I'm not sure how this relates to TFA's point. Are you saying we collectively need to get better at abstraction so that LLMs get better at abstraction (either by training, or our prompting), so that their code is easier to read?