The point of the PB&J thing is exactly to demonstrate that your native tongue isn’t precise enough to program a computer with. There’s a reason those interfaces are rigid, and it’s not “gatekeeping”. (The cryptic part is just to increase information density — see COBOL for an alternative.)
I only took exception to the original statement - that coding is trivial, and the questioning if AI is even useful. So many people are finally able to create things they were never able to. That's something to celebrate. Coding isn't trivial to most people, it's more of an insurmountable barrier to entry. English works - that's why a clear-minded project manager can delegate programming to someone fluent in it, without knowing how to code themselves. We don't end up with them dumping a jar of jam on the floor, because intelligent beings can communicate in the context of a lot of prior knowledge they were trained on. That's how AI is overcoming the peanut butter and jelly problem of English. It doesn't need solutions defined for it, a word to the wise is sufficient.
> intelligent beings can communicate in the context of a lot of prior knowledge
This is key. It works because of previous work. People have shared context because they develop it over time, when we are raised - shared context is passed on the the new generation and it grows.
LLMs consume the context recorded in the training data, but they don't give it back. They diminish it because people don't need to learn the shared context when using this tools. It appears to work in some use cases, but it will degrade our collective shared context over time as people engage with and use these tools that consume past shared context and at the same time atrophy our ability to maintain and increase the shared context. Because the shared context is reproduced and grows when it is learned by people. If a tool just takes it and precludes people learning it, there is a delayed effect where over time there will be less shared context and when the performance of the tool degrades the ability to maintain and extend the shared context will also have degraded. We might get to an irrecoverable state and spiral.
