If instructing an agent is programming then your boss 10 years ago telling you what the software should do is also programming
Having software build software is programming. An agent is software, a human isn't. I can draw a UML diagram, software generates code from that, and software turns it into binary. That still counts as programming I would say, we're just changing the language. Otherwise you would have to say that writing JavaScript is not programming because it's too far removed from Assembly.
It really is the determinism aspect for me. Okay, it’s programming if you sample at temperature 0 with a fixed seed on a fully deterministic inference stack and you have made your prompts the artifact that you iterate on (repo full of natural language that “builds” into the running software it describes with the use of the LLM sampling at temperature 0)
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If I was brainwashed - maybe (hypnosis is sometimes called programming). But I am not, and AI agent is - it's trained to follow instructions, cannot help itself but do it.
Another difference is the binary code - I can run the same agent on a different computing substrate (e.g. different CPU), but with humans no one can do that. That has implications, we can study or modify AI agent behavior, for instance.
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