Someone once said that computer programming is 10% syntax and 90% thinking. Here is Andrej Karpathy with a similar thought, writing on Twitter:

You could see it as there being two modes in creation. Borrowing GAN terminology:
1) generation and
2) discrimination.
e.g. painting – you make a brush stroke (1) and then you look for a while to see if you improved the painting (2). these two stages are interspersed in pretty much all creative work.

Second point. Discrimination can be computationally very hard.
– images are by far the easiest. e.g. image generator teams can create giant grids of results to decide if one image is better than the other. thank you to the giant GPU in your brain built for processing images very fast.
– text is much harder. it is skimmable, but you have to read, it is semantic, discrete and precise so you also have to reason (esp in e.g. code).
– audio is maybe even harder still imo, because it force a time axis so it’s not even skimmable. you’re forced to spend serial compute and can’t parallelize it at all.

You could say that in coding LLMs have collapsed (1) to ~instant, but have done very little to address (2). A person still has to stare at the results and discriminate if they are good. This is my major criticism of LLM coding in that they casually spit out *way* too much code per query at arbitrary complexity, pretending there is no stage 2. Getting that much code is bad and scary. Instead, the LLM has to actively work with you to break down problems into little incremental steps, each more easily verifiable. It has to anticipate the computational work of (2) and reduce it as much as possible. It has to really care.

This leads me to probably the biggest misunderstanding non-coders have about coding. They think that coding is about writing the code (1). It’s not. It’s about staring at the code (2). Loading it all into your working memory. Pacing back and forth. Thinking through all the edge cases. If you catch me at a random point while I’m “programming”, I’m probably just staring at the screen and, if interrupted, really mad because it is so computationally strenuous. If we only get much faster 1, but we don’t also reduce 2 (which is most of the time!), then clearly the overall speed of coding won’t improve (see Amdahl’s law).”