Essence and accident in language model-assisted coding

Summary

In 1986, Fred Brooks posited that there was “no silver bullet” in software engineering—no tool or process that would yield an order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity. He based this assertion on the division of complexity into that which is essential to the problem being solved, and that which is an accident of the way in which we solve the problem. In fact, he considered artificial intelligence of two types: AI-1 is “the use of computers to solve problems that previously could only be solved by applying human intelligence” (here Brooks quotes David Parnas), to Brooks that is things like speech and image recognition; and AI-2 is “The use of a specific set of programming techniques [known] as heuristic or rule-based programming” (Parnas again), which to Brooks means expert systems. He considers that AI-1 isn’t a useful definition and isn’t a source of tackling complexity because results typically don’t transfer between domains. AI-2 contains some of the features we would recognize from today’s programming assistants—finding patterns in large databases of how software has been made, and drawing inferences about how software should be made. The specific implementation technology is very different, but while Brooks sees that such a system can empower an inexperienced programmer with the experience of multiple expert programmers—“no small contribution”—it doesn’t itself tackle the complexity in the programming problem. He also writes about “automatic programming” systems, which he defines as “the generation of a program for solving a problem from a statement of the problem specifications” and which sounds very much like the vibe coding application of language model-based coding tools. He (writing in 1986, remember) couldn’t see how a generalization of automatic programming could occur, but now we can! So how do they fare? Accidental complexity Coding assistants generate the same code that programmers generate, and from that perspective they don’t reduce accidental ...