The story of programming is not largely one of humans striving to be more reliable when programming but putting up better defenses against our own inherent unreliabilities.
When I watch juniors struggle they seem to think that it's because they dont think hard enough whereas it's usually because they didnt build enough infrastructure that would prevent them from needing to think too hard.
As it happens, when it comes to programming, LLM unreliabilities seem to align quite closely with ours so the same guardrails that protect against human programmers' tendencies to fuck up (mostly tests and types) work pretty well for LLMs too.
Comments
The story of programming is not largely one of humans striving to be more reliable when programming but putting up better defenses against our own inherent unreliabilities.
When I watch juniors struggle they seem to think that it's because they dont think hard enough whereas it's usually because they didnt build enough infrastructure that would prevent them from needing to think too hard.
As it happens, when it comes to programming, LLM unreliabilities seem to align quite closely with ours so the same guardrails that protect against human programmers' tendencies to fuck up (mostly tests and types) work pretty well for LLMs too.