202602132031 No, LLMs are not the new compiler
I've been hearing people make these statements about LLMs, AI, and coding lately that fall into the category of "English (or insert your natural/spoken language here) will be the final programming language" or "LLMs are like compilers and higher level languages, they just raise the abstraction level". To which I just have to say categorically, no that's a terrible analogy.
This could be an entire blog post, and maybe I'll write that some day, but there are so many important characteristics of an abstraction like a compiler or higher level language that simply don't apply to LLMs.
One example of these many characteristics that natural language does not have is exactness of specification. Indeed one of the core purposes that natural languages have served since their inception is to communicate humans' wide and varied experiential existence — their phenomenology. As such, its vagaries are not suitable (nor desirable!) for specifying exacting algorithms. Throughout history we have developed specific alternative languages for such endeavors, the primary example being mathematical notations. It is simply better to have a specific notation for these kinds of processes. And guess what? We already have shared technical languages for computing. They are called programming languages.
Compiling a list of the rest of these characteristics that compilers and programming languages have that LLMs and natural languages do not is an exercise left to the reader.
When I say all of this, I am making a judgement on their capabilities today and also suggesting that they fundamentally lack the qualities that make them viable for abstracting deterministic, machine executed logic that is the foundation of all our modern computing and software. I am not however saying that some new technology, new method, or enhancement to the existing tech couldn't be made to have these characteristics. These technologies are currently capable of nearly serving these roles (which strikes me as why the analogy is being attempted to begin with) but do have important and disqualifying differences.