Prompting Is Programming(www.brethorsting.com)
17 pointsby aaronbrethorst4 hours ago7 comments
  • proc02 hours ago
    The reason it's not programming is because the AI has several layers of indirection that take ambiguous descriptions and iterates on them in a similar way a human would before writing the code itself. These layers of indirection are not computer specifications.

    Programming entails specific instructions and a high level of control, a.k.a. specifications. Of course, there are other kinds of specs, like business specs, but here we're talking about specs in the literal sense, where you are being specific of how the machine should work in a predictive sense. We don't do this with prompts, and we expect the AI to do this for us in the same way we expect a human engineer to take ambiguous directions and turn it into the actual computer spec.

    The fact that domain knowledge makes for better prompts is a shortcoming of AI instead of a feature of prompting.

    • t-writescodean hour ago
      SQL and Prolog also operate on several layers of indirection. You’re basically asking for results and it figures out much of the rest.

      I’m not saying you’re wrong to separate it and say there’s a difference, but I don’t think the line where you put it.

  • orthogonal_cube3 hours ago
    No. Prompting is Project Management. You’re setting expectations for what you want and waiting to see what the model provides. You may be learning to articulate things well enough for the specific model you’ve chosen to produce the output you want, but it’s not programming. Only when you manipulate the code is it programming.
    • jesse_dot_id3 hours ago
      It's pair programming. It's definitely not project management because, to build anything useful, I need to know everything I needed to know as a software engineer before AI hit the mainstream. A PM who isn't an experienced engineer could probably come up with the bones of an app, but the app would suck.

      Programming as I remember it pre-AI was essentially just toil and iteration. Programming with AI is nearly zero toil and iteration. The first prompt is like installing a framework. The next 200 prompts are programming.

    • t-writescode3 hours ago
      What role would you assign the “going over the new code with a fine-toothed comb and fixing all of the garbage it’s made, but doing so by talking it through where you’re seeing complexity, asking it to review for that same complexity throughout the rest of its change, etc”?
    • marcus_holmes3 hours ago
      Yeah, kinda, I guess. It's different from Project Management though, because a lot of that was also managing people and expectations (both the stakeholders and the team).

      Writing a really good skill, or a spec document, feels more like programming than Project Management.

  • lawrenceyan43 minutes ago
    I'd argue prompting is more like the PRD or technical design doc you write as a PM
  • marcus_holmes3 hours ago
    This really resonated with me. My co-founder is a really smart man who cannot get good results out of LLMs. I haven't really gone into it with him in any detail, but his experience is like the academic in TFA; it just doesn't do what he wants it to do.

    I'll send him the article and see if a crash-course in "this is how programmers think about problems" helps.

  • t-writescode3 hours ago
    I’ll buy this. I get a lot more out of the code when I ask it to do things in steps.

    Though I absolutely still have to go through it robustly to protect against Claudisms, comments only Claude understands, function names that make sense only with maximum context and a dictionary of that same context, etc. and it still overlaps function responsibility.

    I’m not out of a job yet! Hah.

  • whateveracct3 hours ago
    do prompts fall under curry-howard isomorphism? somehow even less than bash, maybe lol
  • Kalanos3 hours ago
    python instructions are more succinct than english