I'm only doing the first kind right now - I'm not really letting the thing loose ever, even when I'm not great at the language it's writing in. I'm constantly making it refactor and simplify things.

But I'm optimistic about the second way. I'm starting to think that TDD is going to be the new way we specify problems i.e by writing constraints, LLMs are going to keep hacking at those constraints until they're all satisfied, and periodically the temperature will have to be jiggled to knock the thing out of a loop.

The big back and forth between human and machine would be in the process of writing the constraints, which they will be bad at if you're doing anything interesting, and good at if you're doing something routine.

The big question for me is "Is there a way to write complete enough tests that any LLM would generate nearly the same piece of software?" And to follow up, can the test suite be the spec? Would that be an improvement on the current situation, or just as much work? Would that mean that all capable platforms would be abstracted? Does this mean the software improves on its own when the LLM improves, or when you switch to a better LLM, without any changes to the tests?

If the future is just writing tests, is there a better way to do it than we currently do? Are tests the highest-level language? Is this all just Prolog?