Talk to Code
"Learn to Code" was yesterday, "Talk to Code" is about to take over the world. When a new technology is developed, we initially try to adapt it to existing patterns. The programmer writes code. The installer runs scripts. The researcher indexes documents in a database to later retrieve them. These habits feel natural; then something shifts, and the habits turn out to have been contingent and temporary. They were, like many arrangements we mistake as permanent, just what we happened to be doing at the time. Coding agents with large language models have arrived, and they are replacing some patterns with something that looks, on first encounter, suspiciously simple. You describe what you want in English, and the thing gets built. Andrej Karpathy, who has thought about neural nets longer than most, built an application called MenuGen: You photograph a restaurant menu, and the system generates images to illustrate every dish. The application is functional, culturally flu...
