The problem with LLMs as interoperability is they only work sub 100% of the time. Yes they help but the point of the article is what if we spent 100billion on APIs? We absolutely could build something way more interoperable and that’s 100% accurate.

I think about code generation in this space a lot because I’ve been writing Gleam. The LSP code actions are incredible. There’s no “oh sorry I meant to do it the other way” you get with LLMs because everything is strongly typed. What if we spent 100billion on a programming language?

We’ve now spent many hundreds of billions on tools which are powerful but we’ve also chosen to ignore many other ways to spend that money.

> LLMs offer the single biggest advance in interoperability I've ever seen.

> ... we need to build APIs with just enough documentation (and/or one or two illustrative examples) that an LLM can help spit out the glue code needed to hook them together.

If a developer relies on client code generated by an LLM to use an API, how would they know if what was generated is a proper use of said API? Also, what about when lesser used API functionality should be used instead of more often used ones for a given use-case?

If the answer is "unit/integration tests certify the production code", then how would those be made if the developer is reliant upon LLM for code generation? By having an LLM generate the test suite?

And if the answer is "developers need to write tests themselves to verify the LLM generated code", then that implies the developer understands what correct and incorrect API usage is beforehand.

Which begs the question; why bother using an LLM to "spit out the glue code" other than as a way to save some keystrokes which have to be understood anyway?

Today I’ve compiled a few thousand classes of Javadocs in .978 second. I was so impressed, with a build over 2 minutes, each byte of code we write takes a second to execute, computing is actually lightening fast, just now when it’s awfully written.

Time of executing bytecode << REST APIs << launching a full JVM for each file you want to compile << launching an LLM to call an API (each << is above x10).

Agree. I often prefer to screen scrape even when an API is available because the API might contain limited data or other restrictions (e.g. authentication) that web pages do not. If you don't depend on an API, you'll never be reliant on an API.

As if the challenges in writing software are how to hook APIs together.

I get that in the webdev space, that is true to a much larger degree than has been true in the past. But it's still not really the central problem there, and is almost peripheral when it comes to desktop/native/embedded.