Posted on 03/24/2025 9:24:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Way back in 2023, Andrej Karpathy, an eminent AI guru, made waves with a striking claim that “the hottest new programming language is English”. This was because the advent of large language models (LLMs) meant that from now on humans would not have to learn arcane programming languages in order to tell computers what to do. Henceforth, they could speak to machines like the Duke of Devonshire spoke to his gardener, and the machines would do their bidding.
Ever since LLMs emerged, programmers have been early adopters, using them as unpaid assistants (or “co-pilots”) and finding them useful up to a point – but always with the proviso that, like interns, they make mistakes, and you need to have real programming expertise to spot those.
Recently, though, Karpathy stirred the pot by doubling down on his original vision. “There’s a new kind of coding,” he announced, “I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs … are getting too good.
“When I get error messages I just copy [and] paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it … I’m building a project or web app, but it’s not really coding – I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.”
Kevin Roose, a noted New York Times tech columnist, seems to have been energised by Karpathy’s endorsement of the technology. “I am not a coder,” he burbled. “I can’t write a single line of Python, JavaScript or C++ … And yet, for the past several months, I’ve been coding up a storm.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Why is this relevant? Well, by any standards, programming is an elite trade. It is being directly affected by AI, as many other elite professions will be. But will it make programmers redundant? What we are already learning from software co-pilots suggests that the answer is no. It is simply the end of programming as we knew it. As Tim O’Reilly, the veteran observer of the technology industry, puts it, AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. The same is likely to be true of many other elite trades – whether they speak English or not.
I wonder if ai can create code for folks? Maybe even write programs? Not sure how to word it thouh so the ai would,understand what’s being asked.
I shoulda read you post first- looks like it can
I can hardly wait to get on an airliner made by people like this.
In five years, most of the new code on the planet will be written by LLMs. There will be few developers - instead we’ll have solution engineers and product managers who specialize in composing prompts. And in 10 years, we won’t even need the solution engineers and product managers. Software development as a human occupation is swiftly going the way of the horse and buggy.
Thanks- I didn’t think it was fully there yet- and the wording would be a challenge I would think. The second post talks about it error correcting though, but does say it “mostly gets it right” so still not perfected and still needs checking- the advances in computing though are really increasing rapidly- ai gonna be a major player- I think thouhg it’s gonna be used nefarious to create some really bad stuff in the not to distant future. Gonna be a lot more scams, more sophisticated scams- as ai scours the net for info on ehat works best on folks and creates stuff to appeal,to more people-
Not,sure I want an ai that sounds too much like obama- grok though does look interesting
If you can put the logical sequence of the activity you wish the program to perform, things like inputs, actions, and outputs, ai can write a program that does those actions. if it’s not quite what you want, tell it what you want different. be concise and direct. I’m doing it with python now. It’s a tool that opens up your creativity. Like in manufacturing, you no longer have to turn the crank on the machine, the computer directs the motions. It’s great. It can even apply mathematical solutions way beyond your current ability to actually do the math. Magnus Robot Fighter appears to be the future.
I’ve been working on a project with Grok. It’s very complex, and Grok appears to have limited working memory. I have a HUGE prompt that describes the problem in intricate detail. The code generated is ALWAYS missing items described in the prompt. And debugging is painful as it will occasionally just remove big globs for code for no apparent reason. Can it whip out some VBA code to do simple things in Excel? YES! Can it whip out a BASH script to do simple things? YES! But when you get into deep things, it has a problem with those. (Yes, I’ve tried Gemini, chatGPT and CoPilot as well, Grok is the best of the 4)
Interesting.
Thanks for,the explain, ai is really coming into its own for sure.
While I know several programming languages, I also have a Computer science degree, and I know you design software, not just hack away till it works.
Good news for future English majors, if true.
>> the hottest new programming language is English
>> [the others are] arcane programming languages
Funny as I often demand an explanation in English.
Nonetheless, interpretations of English constructs will at best produce approximations that would otherwise be implemented in the more precise “arcane” language.
Silly article.
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