At 0 temperature an LLM is a Map<String,String> - a string input (key) will give you the same string output (value) every time. Hypothesis: there exists a key whose value is a complete, working, fully-tested application which meets your requirements 100% and fulfills your business need. This key is the smallest, most complete description of what your application does. It is written in natural language and represents a significantly compressed version of your application code.
My part-time obsession over the last few months has been trying to demonstrate this and come up with a method for finding these magic keys (I even tried to get the LLMs to search for me, lol). What I really want is to give the latest thinking models (200k input, 100k output) a 5-6 page design doc (4k words, 5k tokens) and have them produce a complete 5kloc (50k tokens) microservice, which would show a 10x compression. It's hard, but I haven't seen any reason to think it wouldn't work.
For better or worse, I think this will be close to what IC jobs will be like in few years. Fundamentally, our jobs are to try work with other functions to agree to some system that needs to exist, then we talk to the computers to actually implement this. If we switch kotlin+compiler for design doc+llm, it still going to be somewhat the same, but far more productive. Agents and such are somewhat of a stop-gap measure, you don't want people giving tasks to machines, you want to accurately describe some idea and then let the computers make it work. You can change your description and they can also figure out their own tasks to evolve the implementation.
My part-time obsession over the last few months has been trying to demonstrate this and come up with a method for finding these magic keys (I even tried to get the LLMs to search for me, lol). What I really want is to give the latest thinking models (200k input, 100k output) a 5-6 page design doc (4k words, 5k tokens) and have them produce a complete 5kloc (50k tokens) microservice, which would show a 10x compression. It's hard, but I haven't seen any reason to think it wouldn't work.
For better or worse, I think this will be close to what IC jobs will be like in few years. Fundamentally, our jobs are to try work with other functions to agree to some system that needs to exist, then we talk to the computers to actually implement this. If we switch kotlin+compiler for design doc+llm, it still going to be somewhat the same, but far more productive. Agents and such are somewhat of a stop-gap measure, you don't want people giving tasks to machines, you want to accurately describe some idea and then let the computers make it work. You can change your description and they can also figure out their own tasks to evolve the implementation.