Thoughts from a younger generation.. [LWN.net]

Thoughts from a younger generation..

Posted May 18, 2026 19:18 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Thoughts from a younger generation.. by paulj
Parent article: RIP Peter G. Neumann

> Perhaps ultimately we will end up formulating technical specification languages, to help humans precisely communicate the requirements to the LLMs. And then the humans can get LLMs to help them prepare the specifications in such technical specification languages, for other LLMs to implement... And...

Don't we have things like that already? It's just that currently they're called compilers, not LLMs ...

Cheers,
Wol

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Thoughts from a younger generation..

Posted May 18, 2026 20:29 UTC (Mon) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link] (2 responses)

What's actually been happening lately is that the LLMs have been instructed to ask the humans clarifying questions when instructions are ambiguous.

Thoughts from a younger generation..

Posted May 19, 2026 8:31 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, ok. Well, that's completely different from current compilers highlighting ambiguous/undefined/error-containing code with a warning/error; and totally different from programmers today asking clarifying questions on a spec from a customer (directly or indirectly via a PM). ;)

The future is so bright. At *last* we have our magic bullet for software engineering!

Eat *that* Brooks!

Thoughts from a younger generation..

Posted May 19, 2026 10:15 UTC (Tue) by malmedal (subscriber, #56172) [Link]

It's very different in that you're operating at a much higher level of abstraction. By several orders of magnitude compared to previous attempts at report generators and wizards.

It's also being done by non-programmers, like the defense editor at The Economist wrote that he had made a program to help him keep track of aircraft movements in the middle east.