Posts

Showing posts from November, 2023

LLMs as "Logic Counselors"

  LLMs have caused quite a commotion in 2023.  There's a fair amount of anxiety among software engineers about what they'll mean for our industry.  Beyond the obvious potential to expedite software creation by supplanting much of the coding exercise directly, LLMs have the potential to enhance even the less tactile aspects of software development. Much of what software engineers do is to act as translators.  Most programming we do today is imperative, meaning you must tell a computer what to do .  In order to do this,  you must first articulate what you want it to do.  For an experienced engineer, writing the code is the easy part.  Getting the customer to clearly express what they want can be more challenging.   There are many reasons for this.  Humans have shared context, cultural norms, physical and emotional experiences.  Computers do not.  Humans are skilled at using language for a myriad of purposes beyond just sharing information (expressing emotion, hiding informa