Coding is not just the program running in memory, its also the process of distributing the mental model of understanding among the team.

If humans increasingly are kept out of coding, then who holds the mental model?

If AI holds the mental model, by definition human prompts will be over lossy channel. This is true without AI too. Software quality is directly dependent on good devs that translate from business/PM speak to technical decisions.

So is coding solved now? it was already solved decades ago.

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pezo1919 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe I’m not even waiting for a model which is 100% at code, but one which is almost 100% at interactively exposing its (almost? correct) mental model.

If I put it like that, it seems to me we are much far away.

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w_for_wumbo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We'll invent other tools to help with the mental models, ones that are more intuitive.

Imagine being able to walk into a house and see immediately the leaks dripping from the ceiling, the clunky layout and smell the stinky garbage that hasn't been collected.

We're already in a sort of IDE when you think about it, we're operating a much larger mental model than any code-base, and we rarely remember that we're operating with such a model.

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dolmen 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Imagine being able to walk into a house and see immediately the leaks dripping from the ceiling, the clunky layout and smell the stinky garbage that hasn't been collected.

No need to imagine. Just open the README.md of many projects.

	▲	theshrike79 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your project README lists all of the bugs and race conditions in the application? Cool!

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rolisz 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mental models existed before coding. The pyramids were not built by just a couple of guys hauling some rocks together. It was a highly structured organization.

Or the East India Company or many other great organizations that achieved big things before computers.

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kolinko 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Who says anyone needs to hold a mental model?

Imho a better way of thinking about it is in terms of views - you can have an unimaginably complex codebase that nobody reads in full, but either agents or humans receive views/perspectives on that codebase.

Before LLMs we couldn’t have built tools that would deliver such views, now we can.

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NichoPaolucci 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I mean... Nobody NEEDs to hold a mental model, but we've been increasingly trying to build that mental model into an agentic codebase... maybe we're doing it wrong but it is NOT going well.

The agents jot down absolutely everything (and more, which is the issue), thousands and thousands files of perceived business logic, decisions, workflows, architecture, data modeling, etc... It gets stale extremely quickly - we change one thing in the system and 570 "shards" need to be updated. I stumble on more and more things every day that are untrue about the agents "mental model" and it appears to just keep doing it. One small addition not properly reviewed by a human introduces a cascade of misconceptions system wide.

We've tried these "views" you mention, we call them subsections, but it runs into the same problems. One falsification ends up poisoning entire projects.

Remember when we use to refactor functions in a codebase in order to slim down complexity? Yeah - we ended up doing that but with documentation... IMO code is deterministic and we have trained professionals who know how to read it quickly and modify it. (We don't even need to write it anymore, but reading it is the simplest way to ensure no-loss understanding of a piece of functionality.)

	▲	kolinko 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, I just dropped all the comments. Memory and session histories are for storing these things, comments just add confusion. Subsections - how do they run into the same problem? What falsification? The views I mean are dynamic ad hoc. Every single small task gets its own temporary view. But perhaps I’m misunderstanding something that you’re saying?

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vb-8448 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The only difference with the past that you need less time to dig through the codebase or documentation, the agent can do it for you and provide only meaningful info, but without a "Mental model"(or knowing what's going under the hood) your own prompts will be the main reason of the sloppiness and high token usage.