I don't love all of Suresh's framings around LLMs^[1], but I do appreciate that his closer exposure to them has given him the perspective to write this piece. This matches my experience very closely. I've so far managed to avoid participating in the false zealotry he describes, but I'm not sure how much longer I can manage it. My colleagues have not. I can hardly blame them.

Meanwhile, it's extremely clear to anyone who hasn't succumbed to the reality distortion field that this monomania is completely corrosive to the organization. Suresh documents the realities of this corrosion, although I imagine most people reading this have seen it in one or another aspects of their lives.

Personally, I'm just doing my best to grit my teeth and try to do good work as best I can, both professionally and personally, until we get back to a point where the managerial consensus is once again that "quality" is a real thing that exists. Until then, I suffer.

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1. I feel that a hard-line zero-tolerance standpoint is necessary due to the myriad negative externalities and the strong tendency for "well I can see it being a bit useful for X" being taken in bad faith as a broad license to use it "where it makes sense". Even in cases where they're not strictly enforceable, zero tolerance policies establish a culture and enable enforcement of…

the older I get, the more I understand my grandfather

I contend that it is impossible for so-called "AI", by which I mean the crop of convolutional neural network-based pattern-filling tools that is currently in the throes of a hype cycle that puts crypto and NFTs to shame, to meaningfully do programming. As more and more of the mind bogglingly rich tech oligarchs lead their followers into the delusion that these tools are useful in any way remotely comparable to their cost, I think it's worth taking the time to articulate exactly why this is, even if it's already intuitively clear to the more thoughtful practitioners of the craft.

We must begin, as always, with a clarity of the term under discussion. "Programming", in its broadest sense, is the act of making a computer do something—but "do something" is itself vague, so we'll need to dig a little deeper into that. To understand it, please bear with me as I establish some useful terminology.

A Brief Meander into the Philosophy of Language

Let's talk about syntax and semantics. If you're a programmer, you may be familiar with these terms as they're used to discuss programming languages. If you're not, that's fine too. I'll do my best to explain them in brief.

Syntax and semantics are two related ways of talking about an abstract structure. Although the concepts were originally developed to describe human languages, they can be used by analogy for all sorts of things, which is what I'm building up to here. They're very useful particularly for understanding how humans^[1] relate to those structures and relate those structures to the world as they understand it.

"Syntax" is simply the structure itself, in all the technical detail of how it fits together. The syntax of a human language is the way its words and sentences fit together, what's "allowed" and "not allowed" by the subtle and mercurial rules we all internalized as children (or adults, for second languages and beyond). In English, "ran boy" is not a valid sentence due to the language's semantics, although most native speakers would probably guess that it means "the boy ran". Noam Chomsky wrote "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an example of a sentence that is syntactically valid despite being nonsense.

The fact that that sentence is nonsense is the domain of "semantics". Semantics are the human interpretation of a structure, the meaning we ascribe to it and to the best of our ability share with those around us. For example, although the syntax of the sentences "みなさんはピッコロさんが大好きだよ！" and "Everyone loves Piccolo!"^[2] are completely different, their meaning—their semantic content—is exactly the same. And that meaning is something that humans bring to them, not something that is in any way intrinsically associated with those particular wiggly lines in that particular order.

Although syntax is a very useful concept in its own right, in this post I really want to focus on semantics. So remember: semantics is meaning, and specifically it's meaning applied to a structure from outside by humans.

A Better Definition…