My understanding of manual machining in the modern day is that only really big or really specialty jobs (as in, just a weird process that there isn’t a good CNC machine for) are done manually anymore. But specialty and low volume, which is exactly where LLMs are nice because I can spec it exactly how I want. I wonder what the software equivalent of “big” is. Like, you need a part made on a lathe with a 3 foot diameter throat, only one guy in a 500 mile radius has a machine that big, from 1962, so he’s your guy. That guy can stay in business with manual machining. But standard, high volume parts need to be on CNC to be competitive.
The equivalent is probably weird, proprietary DSLs / standard libraries that AI has not been able to ingest so it performs poorly on. But maybe these days LLMs don't even really struggle with these sorts of domains.
Yeah I’d have to imagine that as long as you have the same fundamental ideas (variables, functions, loops, arrays, etc.) the syntax doesn’t matter at all. Plus it can just try, see and error, and read the error. I doubt there’s a language out there that they haven’t a) ingested and b) can’t handle.
I think perhaps the equivalent would be “this environment quite literally can’t support having an LLM attached to it”, as in say some totally airgapped AND low-performance things (industrial computing, PLCs, military stuff, etc.).
