LLMs are nowhere near the first step. This is Python, an almost 35 year old language:
for apple in sorted(bag):
snake.eat(apple)
The whole point of high-level programming languages is we can write code that is close enough to natural language while still being 100% precise and unambiguous.
High level programming languages should be able to do much that LLMs can do when it comes to natural language expression of ideas into computing behavior, but with the extreme advantage of 100% predictable execution. LLM queries, system prompts, and context, of sufficient complexity, required to get reasonably good results out of the LLM, begin to look like computer code and require skills similar to software engineering; but still without the predictable conformance. Why not just write computer code?
Our industry developed some insanely high productivity languages, frameworks, and ways of thinking about systems development, in the mid-2000s. Rails is the best example of this; Wordpress, Django, certainly a few others. Then, for some reason, around the early 2010s, we just forgot about that direction of abstraction. Javascript, Go, and Rust took over, React hit in the mid-2010s, microservices and kubernetes, and it feels like we forgot about something that we shouldn't have ever forgotten about.
> What she wants is to tell her phone to switch it's background to the picture she took last night of the family.
Which is kind of absurd. If you were asking a friend to hang a picture would you verbally describe the picture to them or just show them which one to hang?
There is a lot of "if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" going on.
