“Codegen is not productivity”

In other—worse—words, programming is not about writing code that makes the computer do a specific thing, or at least not exclusively or primarily about that. Programming is an exercise in representing abstract ideas and managing complexity while doing that. Programming is as often an exploration of these things as it is an implementation of them.

I enjoyed this post, and I think it’s got some really good observations. I do think it underestimates the power of having working software that really does something, gives you a sense of what you wish it did instead, etc. Yes, LLM output might effectively be a high-fidelity prototype, but I think that’s not a bad thing. If it gets to production without the proper refinement into working software, then that’s probably bad, and I’m sure it will happen a lot. But if LLMs make refining that prototype into something that does the job, I’m here for it.