LLMs bring new nature of abstraction

LLMs are presented as a shift comparable to the move from assembler to high-level languages. Earlier advances raised abstraction and productivity, but kept programming in the same basic relation to the machine. Prompts change that relation and add non-determinism.

Reading notes

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• High-level languages let programmers think in statements, conditionals, iteration, and names instead of machine instructions.
• Those languages improved ease of use, but still left programming in the same general mode as assembler.
• Prompts are described as a different way of talking to the machine, as different from Ruby as Fortran was from assembler.
• LLMs add a non-deterministic abstraction, so the same prompt cannot be stored in git and expected to behave the same every time.
• The article says this move is both upward in abstraction and sideways into non-determinism.
• The author expects software work with LLMs to require learning how to live with that non-determinism.