It is a new nature of abstraction, not a new level.

UP: It lets us state intent in plain language, specs, or examples. We can ask the model to invent code, tests, docs, diagrams—tasks that previously needed human translation from intention to syntax.

BUT SIDEWAYS: Generation is a probability distribution over tokens. Outputs vary with sampling temperature, seed, context length, and even with identical prompts.

I don't get his argument, and if it wasn't Martin Fowler I would just dismiss it. He admits himself that it's not an abstraction over previous activity as it was with HLLs, but rather a new activity altogether - that is prompting LLMs for non-deterministic outputs.

Even if we assume there is value in it, why should it replace (even if in part) the previous activity of reliably making computers do exactly what we want?

I'm in the process of actually building LLM based apps at the moment, and Martin Fowler's comments are on the money. The fact is seemingly insignificant changes to prompts can yield dramatically different outcomes, and the odd new outcomes have all these unpredictable downstream impacts. After working with deterministic systems most of my career it requires a different mindset.

It's also a huge barrier to adoption by mainstream businesses, which are used to working to unambiguous business rules. If it's tricky for us developers it's even more frustrating to end users. Very often they end up just saying, f* it, this is too hard.

I also use LLM's to write code and for that they are a huge productivity boon. Just remember to test! But I'm noticing that use of LLM's in mainstream business applications lags the hype quite a bit. They are touted as panaceas, but like any IT technology they are tricky to implement. People always underestimate the effort necessary to get a real return, even with deterministic apps. With indeterministic apps it's an even bigger problem.

I respect Martin Fowler greatly but those who, by their own admission, have not used current AI coding tools really don't have much to add regarding how they affect our work as developers.

I do hope he takes the time to get good with them!