That was a painfull read for me. It reminds me of a specific annoyance I had at university with a professor who loved to make sweeping, abstract claims that sounded incredibly profound in the lecture hall but evaporated the moment you tried to apply them. It was always a hidden 'I-am-very-smart' attempt that fell apart if you actually deconstructed the meaning, the logic, or the claimed results. This article is the exact same breed of intellectualizing. It feels deep, but there is no actual logical hold if you break up the claims and deductive steps.
You can see it clearly if you just translate the article's expensive vocabulary into plain English. When the author writes, 'When you hand-build, the space of possibilities is explored through design decisions you’re forced to confront,' they are just saying, 'When you write code yourself, you have to choose how to write it.' When they claim, 'contextuality is dominated by functional correctness,' they just mean, 'Usually, we just care if the code works.' When they warn about 'inviting us to outsource functional precision itself,' they really mean, 'LLMs let you be lazy.' And finaly, 'strengthening the will to specify,' is just a dramatic way of saying, 'We need to write better requirements.' It is obscurantism plain and simple. using complexity to hide the fact that the insight is trivial.
But that is just an estethical problem to me. Worse. The argument collapses entirely when you look at the logical leap between the premises.
The author basically argues that because Natural Language is vague, engineers will inevitably stop caring about the details and just accept whatever reasonable output the AI gives. This is pure armchair psychology. It assumes that just because the tool allows for vagueness, professionals will suddenly abandon the concept of truth or functional requirements. That is a massive, unsubstantiated jump.
If we use fuzzy matching to find contacts on our phones all the time. Just because the search algorithm is imprecise doesn't mean we stop caring if we call the right person. We don't say, 'Well, the fuzzy match gave me Bob instead of Bill, I guess I'll just talk to Bob now.' The hard constraint, the functional requirement of talking to the specific person you need, remains absolute. Similarly, in software, the code either compiles and passes the tests, or it doesn't. The medium of creation might be fuzzy, but the execution environment is binary. We aren't going to drift into accepting broken banking software just because the prompt was in English.
This entire essay feels like those social psychology types that now have been thoroughly been discredited by the replication crisis in psychology. The ones who are where concerned with dazzling people with verbal skills than with being right. It is unnecessarily complex, relying on projection of dreamt up concepts and behavior, rather than observation. THIS tries to sound profound by turning a technical discussion into a philosophical crisis, but underneath the word salad, it is not just shallow, it is wrong.
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