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0 pointsstitched2gethr1y ago0 comments

I think this misses the point. It seems like the author is saying we should move from imperative instructions to a declarative document that describes what the software should do.

Imperative: - write a HTTP server that serves jokes - add a healthcheck endpoint - add TLS and change the serving port to 443

Declarative: - a HTTP server that serves jokes - contains a healthcheck endpoint - supports TLS on port 443

The differences here seem minimal because you can see all of it at once, but in the current chat paradigm you'd have to search through everything you've said to the bot to get the full context, including the side roads that never materialized.

In the document approach you're constantly refining the document. It's better than reviewing the code because (in theory) you're looking at "support TLS on port 443" instead of a lot of code, which means it can be used by a wider audience. And ideally I can give the same high level spec to multiple LLMs and see which makes the best application.

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ygouzerh1y ago

Good explanation! As an open-reflexion: will a declarative document be as detailed as the imperative version? Often between the specs that the product team is providing (that we can consider as the "descriptive" document) and the implementation, many sub specs have been created by the tech team that uncovered some important implementation details. It's like a Rabbit Hole.

For example, for a signup page, we could have: - Declarative: Signup the user using their email address - Imperative: To do the same, we will need to implement the smtp library, which means discovering that we need an SMTP server, so now we need to choose which one. And when purchasing an SMTP Server plan, we discover that there are rate limit, so now we need to add some bot protection to our signup page (IP Rate Limit only? ReCaptcha? Cloudflare bot protection?), etc

Which means that at the end, the imperative code way is kind of like the ultimate implementation specs.

bze121y ago

I could imagine a hybrid where declarative statements drive the high-level, and lower-level details branch off and are hashed out imperatively (in chat). Maybe those detail decisions then revise the declarative statements.

The source of truth would still be the code though, otherwise the declarative statements would get so verbose that they wouldn't be any more useful than writing the code itself.

skydhash1y ago

The issue is that there’s no execution platform for declarative specs, so something will be translated to imperative and that is where the issue lies. There’s always an imperative core which needs to be deterministic or it’s out needs to be verified. LLMs are not the former and the latter option can take more time than just writing the code.

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