I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark. [LWN.net]

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 16, 2026 10:24 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark. by QxDEADBEEF
Parent article: Vibe-coded ext4 for OpenBSD

AI tools for coding convert human language to source code.

The big difference is that programming languages are fairly well defined and unambiguous (there are some undefined behaviors, but those are the exceptions, not the rule). On the other hand this is not true for the human languages. There are attempts to somewhat formalize human languages (e.g. a "lawyerspeak" or "legalese" dialect is used to write laws) to avoid this ambiguity, but it's far from perfect (for example the Hungarian word "illetve" might mean both "or" or "and" - and lawmakers do use it due to stylistics reasons). I think (hope?) that there will be a kind of prompting language as well which is slightly different than the normal, every day human language.

I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

Posted Apr 17, 2026 7:09 UTC (Fri) by QxDEADBEEF (guest, #175948) [Link]

> I think (hope?) that there will be a kind of prompting language as well which is slightly different than the normal, every day human language.

Such a language could be used to define the software requirements specification.
In any case the AI tools shall be capable enough to recognize the ambiguity in either the prompting language itself or the described problem. And to ask user for clarifications to minimize the uncertainty of the final answer (generated code).