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benrutter | on: The foolishness of "natural language programming" (1978)
I don't have strong opinions on when it's ok to use the work "programming" or not, but I think if you're using claude-code/pi/open-code/etc to produce something like a website or application, the "program" is the code the LLM outputs, not your prompt etc.

I don't think I'd want to call it "natural language programming" in the way Dijstra's implying here unless the prompt was the thing that was actively being executed/ran/whatever when someone loads your app or website.

cgarvis | parent
I've seen some newer testing frameworks where you prompt for the outcome you want under a specific scenario. The first run is a LLM agent that figures out the steps but those steps are then used for recurring runs. If something fails, it goes back to the agent loop to see if it's an actual error.

This works well in e2e type tests where the test implementation might change but the customer experience hasn't.

So maybe there is a hybrid approach in our future.

benrutter | root | parent
Yeah, that's an interesting case study. It's pretty common practice to do something like llm-as-a-judge if your programming agentic systems.

I think those are different from pure "natural langyage programming" though because there's normally code you've written that's calling out to the LLM, so it's within the context of written code.

I think this, and lots of other comments are so interesting. There are a lot of different increasingly complex ways LLM outputs and coding are being tied together by people, that I hadn't really considered.