alt Hacker NewsCoding is not just the program running in memory, its also the process of distributing the mental model of understanding among the team.
If humans increasingly are kept out of coding, then who holds the mental model?
If AI holds the mental model, by definition human prompts will be over lossy channel. This is true without AI too. Software quality is directly dependent on good devs that translate from business/PM speak to technical decisions.
So is coding solved now? it was already solved decades ago.
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We'll invent other tools to help with the mental models, ones that are more intuitive.
Imagine being able to walk into a house and see immediately the leaks dripping from the ceiling, the clunky layout and smell the stinky garbage that hasn't been collected.
We're already in a sort of IDE when you think about it, we're operating a much larger mental model than any code-base, and we rarely remember that we're operating with such a model.
Who says anyone needs to hold a mental model?
Imho a better way of thinking about it is in terms of views - you can have an unimaginably complex codebase that nobody reads in full, but either agents or humans receive views/perspectives on that codebase.
Before LLMs we couldn’t have built tools that would deliver such views, now we can.