For complicated prompts, I always add this:

"Before you start, please ask me any questions you have about this so I can give you more context. Be extremely comprehensive."

(I got the idea from a Medium article[1].) The LLM will, indeed, stop and ask good questions. It often notices what I've overlooked. Works very well for me!

[1] https://medium.com/@jordan_gibbs/the-most-important-chatgpt-...

When COBOL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"

When SQL was born, some people said, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"

Now we have AI prompting, and some people are saying, "It's English! We won't need programmers anymore!"

Really?

The problem I have with this argument is that it actually is English this time.

COBOL and SQL aren't English, they're formal languages with keywords that look like English. LLMs work with informal language in a way that computers have never been able to before.

Say that to the prompt guys and their AGENT.md rules.

Formalism is way easier than whatever this guys are concocting. And true programmer bliss is live programming. Common programming is like writing a sheet music and having someone else play it. Live programming is you at the instrument tweaking each part.

Yes natural languages are by nature ambiguous. Sometimes it's better to write specification in code rather than in a natural language(Jetbrains MPS for example).

This is true.

But in faithful adherence to some kind of uncertainty principle, LLM prompts are also not a programming language, no matter if you turn down the temperature to zero and use a specialized coding model.

They can just use programming languages as their output.

On the other hand, the problem is exactly that it’s not a formal language.

This is also a strength. Formal languages struggle to work with concepts that cannot be precisely defined, which are especially common in the physical world.

e.g. it is difficult to write a traditional program to wash dishes, because how do you formally define a dish? You can only show examples of dishes and not-dishes. This is where informal language and neural networks shine.

I can't wait to bring a whole restaurant's dishwashing to a halt with an adversarial plate that has some droplets of paint on it the color of steak sauce.

I can't agree more.

Every time they have been closer to being right.

The thing is... All those people were right. We no longer need the kinds of people we used to call programmers. There exists a new job, only semi related, that now goes by the name programmer. I don't know how many of the original programming professionals managed to make the transition to this new progression.

All the Python-based functionality of this project can now be handled by the mcptools package[1]. That is, mcptools can field MCP requests and dispatch to R code; no need for an intermediate layer of Python. I wonder if the author knows about mcptools? Or did he start coding before it was available?

[1] https://posit-dev.github.io/mcptools/

Somehow, I assumed that a Cursor-like capability for RStudio would be implemented as an add-in extension, not via fork. Does this mean that every new release of RStudio will require a rebuild by Lotas and a re-download by its users?

There's a lot of that had to be changed at a pretty deep level to build this assistant. So an add-on wasn't really feasible.

This tactic is usually used to attract VC money down the road. VCs don't typically invest in plugins/add-ons; they prefer products.

R is used extensively in quant finance. The quant traders, portfolio managers, and risk managers with whom I work all use R.

Probabilities sum to 1.0. Odds don't sum.

I've worked for corporations that need to generate reports and distribute them internally. I created an RSS feed on the report generation machine, then asked users to subscribe to the feed within Microsoft Outlook. That worked well because users are often in Outlook. They would see the RSS notification and think, "Hey! Look! A new report!". (Well, maybe not that enthusiastically.)