Simon Willison’s Weblog

The hard part of computer programming isn't expressing what we want the machine to do in code. The hard part is turning human thinking -- with all its wooliness and ambiguity and contradictions -- into computational thinking that is logically precise and unambiguous, and that can then be expressed formally in the syntax of a programming language.

That was the hard part when programmers were punching holes in cards. It was the hard part when they were typing COBOL code. It was the hard part when they were bringing Visual Basic GUIs to life (presumably to track the killer's IP address). And it's the hard part when they're prompting language models to predict plausible-looking Python.

The hard part has always been – and likely will continue to be for many years to come – knowing exactly what to ask for.

— Jason Gorman, The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers