What people like about code is that you can run it and then it does exactly the things you wrote! And there is a precise, predictable relationship between the code and what it does, which you can fully understand and reason about!

Neither natural-language-writing nor LLM-prompting does give you that.

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jaynetics an hour ago | parent [-]

I think your argument has two facettes:

1. It is great to see an effect of your thoughts, like something happening in the real world. 2. Coding offers a feeling of perfect control due to the deterministic nature of code.

I would argue that 1 is still the case with LLMs, and 2 was always just 95% true, never 100%, because of oversights, bugs in libraries, and what have you.

So what actually decays is maybe not so much the feeling of self-efficacy, but the feeling of control, and even this is a gradual change. Perhaps it would be less unsettling if it didn't happen at the same time as a potential loss of control in other areas: career, salary, mode of working etc.

	▲	layer8 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		1 combines with 2 because you can think about what changes to make to your code, and then that changed version runs. This is different from instructing an LLM to change something for you, where you have no insight in the underlying artifact being changed, or can’t predict what and how exactly the LLM will change it. 1 isn’t only about seeing the effects of your thoughts, it’s at least as much about transforming your thoughts into a more suitable, discrete and exact representation, whose effects you will in turn see. Having code as the intermediate representation that you work on, and that you work in terms of, is essential to both 1 and 2. Similar to how for a physicist, writing down formulas and working with them, transforming them, is essential. The code is the language of thought, the model of thought, of what then gets reified as behavior at runtime.