Literate Programming at the dawn of LLMs

Since the beginning of the year, the industry’s main focus seems to revolve around “prompting.” We’ve seen the emergence of new job titles, new job descriptions, and even the introduction of “prompting wizards,” all of which are essentially part of branding and marketing strategies.

Prompting involves articulating a problem and providing clear instructions in the hope that the person or system reading it will produce the intended outcome. The recent shift lies in the recipient of these instructions: rather than a person taking action to solve the problem and follow the instructions, it’s now a thing (currently some form of AI model) that carries out the task.

What I find amusing, after 20 years of professional experience in software development and engineering management, is that we’re finally getting engineers to generate a substantial amount of text instead of solely focusing on writing code. This appears to signify quite a significant paradigm shift to me.

Continue reading...