// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Markdown in /src
In order to supplement my income as a professor at Montana State University, I do consulting on the side. I enjoy consulting and the act of writing code & helping build systems, both for their own sake and also because it keeps my skills relevant and allows me to teach students about the latest ideas in software development.
Obviously the biggest thing to happen in development in the last few years is agentic coding: using LLMs to generate code in lieu of hand coding. I have written a few essays on this topic:
In this essay I want to discuss an idea that is becoming increasingly clear to me as I work in companies that are prioritizing agentic coding:
This is not a novel or particularly clever idea, of course.
In Markdown is the new source code, Hartley Brody writes:
It is starting to feel as if the application logic of the software is being defined and edited as markdown, and the actual code that is generated by the agent is sort of becoming a low-level implementation detail.
Now, as the essays above show, I am ambivalent about AI-generated code. However, my consulting work shows that organizations are headed in this direction, often at terrific speed.
What I want to do in the remainder of this essay is think about the ramifications of Markdown becoming, more and more, the source of truth for software systems.
There is a line of thinking, captured in the quote above, that LLMs are akin to compilers, taking high-level specifications and turning them into low-level implementations. In this view, we don’t need to look at the code an LLM generates, just as we don’t look at the machine code a compiler generates.
As I mention in Code is Cheap(er), I do not totally agree with this analogy for a few reasons, but the one relevant to this essay is: compiler workflows retain their original source code while LLM workflows typically do not.