iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Ant Stanley @iamstan.dev · 26/07/2026

hey dude... you're missing a ton of context on this. You need to read the paper. It's one of the great systems papers. pablo.rauzy.name/dev/naur1985... The argument it makes is that "A program is a shared mental construct that lives in the minds of the people who work on it"

Peter Naur’s classic 1985 essay “Programming as Theory Building” argues that a program is not its source code. A program is a shared mental construct (he uses the word theory) that lives in the minds of the people who work on it. If you lose the people, you lose the
program. The code is merely a written representation of the program, and it’s lossy, so you can’t reconstruct a program from its code.

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Ant Stanley @iamstan.dev · 26/07/2026

Even when an LLM writes 100% of the code there is a human behind it with a mental model of what they want the program to be. It that context, an LLM can tell you about the code base, but not the theory behind it.

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Ant Stanley @iamstan.dev · 26/07/2026

Also that mastodon post is by Ruth Malan, one of the leading software architects on the planet with more papers behind her than most of us. She's smart, considered, and not one to jump on bandwagons.

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