alt Hacker NewsSeems like an odd criticism given that programming has always been about abstraction. But sure, I don’t know tree-level details (functions) but I also wasn’t doing leaf-level (bits) understanding because that became obsolete. Now I’m on forest level and expanding to eco systems.
You can always know more but at a certain point, after you’ve built enough validation and safe guards, you find it’s not the best use of your time and the things you can make beyond your specialization is quite remarkable.
Also, I think the toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube with this
Replies
> You can always know more
But the direction is reversed.
I figure out how to do something, wrap it in a bunch of functions, and then kinda just use it. If it just keeps doing what it should, I may kinda forget how it works. But I don't forget that I made it, and that I understood it, that will never not have happened. So in a way, I am able to "forget" some things because I still know I knew them. And I trust that programmers who write programs that I dream about writing also know what they're doing.
With LLM, you accumulate stuff with from knows where, ultimately fished from a vast ocean named question mark, by whatever turns of phrase you and involved agents happened to use, and what the temperature was at that moment. Which is of course where all the harnessing and looping and running code on the output comes in, but still, ultimately you have no idea. Which is fine for prototypes, but long term? Good luck.
AI is not an abstraction.