John RegehrI'm fundamentally a tool builder, and LLM coding agents work one million times better if you give them good tools, and I wrote a thing about this
James Widman@regehr it seems like people who work in biology departments could have told us that this was coming: LLMs are to random mutation as oracles are to natural selection (like how a fast predator effectively selects relatively-faster prey for breeding).
@regehr also it seems like we're having kind of a monkey's-paw kind of moment: we've always wanted better languages/tools for expressing & automatically checking whether a program satisfies some formal specification, and now more motive for that improvement is coming from... LLMs.
it's like hoping for more countries to go all-in on solar panel deployment, and then they finally do, but the motive comes from a war in iran started by an insane american ruling class.
@JamesWidman yes I've been thinking about the monkey's paw often recently