> We're the last generation of people who translate ideas into code by hand. Our children will describe what they want and watch it appear on screen, the same way we describe what we want to search engines and watch results appear.

Describing what you want is programming! Code is great for that because it is more precise and less ambiguous than natural languages.

The part about search engines is missing a key element. When you do a search engine search or query a LLM, you interact with the system, using your own brain to interpret and refine the results. The idea with programming is having the machine do it all by itself with no supervision, that's why you need to be extra precise.

It is not so different from having a tradesman build you something. If you have a good idea of what you want and don't want to supervise him constantly, you have to be really precise with your request, casual language is not enough. You need technical terms and blueprints, in the same way that programmers have their programming language.

Yep, I am surprised by this whole vibe coding phenomenon. I find it imprecise, and I have to very carefully translate what I want into English, a very imprecise language with a lot of nuance. Either I spend a lot of time coming up with a good prompt, or I iterate with the AI (both of which I find take away from the joy of programming). I joke that we need some sort of logical language which we can write for the computer to understand...

I do like AI as a tool, it's great at a lot of things, but it not the panacea that so many believe, especially CEOs unfortunately.

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