Business users get frustrated trying to consciously comprehend all the ways their businesses work that they only thought about at a subconscious level until they were asked to piece together an abstract model.
> Very few problems are worth training a developer on the details of my business.
But that's just what you'd be doing anyway, substituting a dumb prompt (the machine) for a smart, interactive prompt (the developer.) There's a certain amount of domain knowledge that has to be extracted from the mind and modeled before any program will function correctly, and all a developer really is (beyond a simple expert system for picking algorithms) is a translator that knows the "good questions" to ask to refine the model in your mind.
I'm reminded of an exercise I once did in elementary school: we would each draw some odd shape on a piece of paper, then pick another person and, just by blind dictation, try to instruct them in drawing a perfect replica of what was on your page. There was a distinct division between the people who thought others would carry the same assumptions in their mental model as they do, and those that knew that for any true communication to occur, portable standards had to be adopted (in this case in inches and degrees rotation, basically turning the penman into a logo turtle.)
Programming is all the Computer Science hard-problem-y stuff for sure, but it's, more importantly I think, figuring out just what problems we're trying to solve. The former may one day be done by AI, but the latter (unless schools start teaching logic, rhetoric, philosophy, psychology, and perhaps something like linguistics from an early age) will always be the realm of those who have the innate understanding of the differences between different individuals' mental models.
> Very few problems are worth training a developer on the details of my business.
But that's just what you'd be doing anyway, substituting a dumb prompt (the machine) for a smart, interactive prompt (the developer.) There's a certain amount of domain knowledge that has to be extracted from the mind and modeled before any program will function correctly, and all a developer really is (beyond a simple expert system for picking algorithms) is a translator that knows the "good questions" to ask to refine the model in your mind.
I'm reminded of an exercise I once did in elementary school: we would each draw some odd shape on a piece of paper, then pick another person and, just by blind dictation, try to instruct them in drawing a perfect replica of what was on your page. There was a distinct division between the people who thought others would carry the same assumptions in their mental model as they do, and those that knew that for any true communication to occur, portable standards had to be adopted (in this case in inches and degrees rotation, basically turning the penman into a logo turtle.)
Programming is all the Computer Science hard-problem-y stuff for sure, but it's, more importantly I think, figuring out just what problems we're trying to solve. The former may one day be done by AI, but the latter (unless schools start teaching logic, rhetoric, philosophy, psychology, and perhaps something like linguistics from an early age) will always be the realm of those who have the innate understanding of the differences between different individuals' mental models.