English is the hottest new programming language
In plain wordsA catchphrase meaning that people can now get computers to do things by describing what they want to an AI in ordinary language, instead of writing code.
A slogan expressing the idea that natural-language instructions to a large language modellarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. have become a practical way to program computers, so that writing clear English — or any human language — is now itself a form of software development. It sums up the shift behind prompt engineeringprompt engineering, n.: The skill of writing requests to an AI — picking the words, examples, format and background information it receives — so that it reliably gives the result you want, without retraining it., vibe codingvibe coding, n.: Programming by conversation: you ask an AI for what you want, try out what it produces and ask again until it works, trusting the code without really reading it. and Software 3.0Software 3.0, n.: Andrej Karpathy's name for programming computers by writing plain-language instructions for AI models, following traditional code (Software 1.0) and trained neural networks (Software 2.0).. Skeptics answer that natural language is ambiguous, that model outputs vary from run to run, and that dependable systems still need precise specifications, tests and code review, so the slogan describes a new interface to computing rather than the end of programming.
If English is the hottest new programming language, then most of our bugs are now ambiguities in the spec.
Origin
Posted by Andrej Karpathy on Twitter in January 2023, about two months after ChatGPT's release, as 'The hottest new programming language is English'. It was widely reposted and became a stock line in talks and articles about AI and the future of programming.
Related
- Software 3.0Software 3.0, n.: Andrej Karpathy's name for programming computers by writing plain-language instructions for AI models, following traditional code (Software 1.0) and trained neural networks (Software 2.0).
- Software 2.0Software 2.0, n.: Andrej Karpathy's 2017 name for software whose behavior is learned from examples by a neural network instead of being written line by line by programmers.
- vibe codingvibe coding, n.: Programming by conversation: you ask an AI for what you want, try out what it produces and ask again until it works, trusting the code without really reading it.
- prompt engineeringprompt engineering, n.: The skill of writing requests to an AI — picking the words, examples, format and background information it receives — so that it reliably gives the result you want, without retraining it.
- Andrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy, prop. n.: A Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and teacher who co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's self-driving vision team, and coined popular phrases such as 'vibe coding'.
- promptprompt, n.: The message or instructions you give an AI system — a question, a request, some examples or a document — that it responds to. Clearer prompts generally get better results.
Mentioned in
vibe codingvibe coding, n.: Programming by conversation: you ask an AI for what you want, try out what it produces and ask again until it works, trusting the code without really reading it., Andrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy, prop. n.: A Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and teacher who co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla's self-driving vision team, and coined popular phrases such as 'vibe coding'., prompt engineerprompt engineer, n.: A person whose job is writing and testing the instructions given to AI models so they behave reliably; hyped in 2023 as a six-figure job anyone could learn, the role has since largely merged into ordinary engineering., Software 2.0Software 2.0, n.: Andrej Karpathy's 2017 name for software whose behavior is learned from examples by a neural network instead of being written line by line by programmers., Software 3.0Software 3.0, n.: Andrej Karpathy's name for programming computers by writing plain-language instructions for AI models, following traditional code (Software 1.0) and trained neural networks (Software 2.0).