Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers

"If a farmer has made a path, he is able to saunter easily up and down it. That is what the path was made for. But the work of making the path was not a process of sauntering easily, but one of marking the ground, digging, fetching loads of gravel, rolling and draining. He dug and rolled where there was yet no path, so that he might in the end have a path on which he could saunter without any more digging or rolling. Similarly a person who has a theory can, among other things, expound to himself, or the world, the whole theory or any part of it; he can, so to speak, saunter in prose from any part to any other part of it. But the work of building the theory was a job of making paths where as yet there were none. The point of the analogy is this. Epistemologists very frequently describe the labours of building theories in terms appropriate only to the business of going over or teaching a theory that one already has; as if, for example, the chains of propositions which constitute Euclid’s ... Read full article.