Sue SmithThis, writing specifications is significantly harder than writing code in my experience, I shudder to think of folk attempting this as a way to learn how to build software
https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-spec-is-code
The most annoying thing for me is that LLMs could absolutely help people learn to code, but overwhelmingly not by generating code, that's the myopic focus because it's the utility that promises to undermine labour
David Thomson@sue often thought that they’d be useful for learning (human) languages, and maybe some of those apps already do that: have a conversation about different likely scenarios, rather than learning to say “the monkey is in the tree” or whatever.
Jfrench@sue I've tried to pick up new coding languages using llms and it's been patchy. As when they lie I don't have prior knowledge to fall back on. When they are assisting with something I know it's much easier to call bs when they do this.
I think the big lie is that llms allow you to think less. If you use them, and they can be useful, you have to think much more.
I think the big lie is that llms allow you to think less. If you use them, and they can be useful, you have to think much more.
Christian Berger DECT 2763@sue Yes, I mean there are now systems like Autocode where you just enter some specifications in a special language and they'll just spit out the machine code for you. No actual programming required.
Howard Chu @ Symas@sue when I was at JPL I found it frustrating that we spent months writing specs before writing any code. Most of the specs would be wildly inaccurate by the time you were writing the actual code, because of other parameters you'd need, differences in how you broke out the work into individual functions, etc... So tedious.