English Is Not the Hottest New Programming Language

If you have a chance to spend enough time vibe-coding, you have probably faced the problem. When the system logic is complex, describing it in a prompt often becomes overwhelmingly verbose. I often find it harder to express the logic in natural language than in code.

That happens for a reason.

English has ~50-75% redundancy, built into its grammar and semantics, which is required for... Well, for us, humans, communicate reliably without losing the thread of conversation.

For comparison, programming languages typically contain only 10-30% redundancy, which is contributed by syntax that makes the code readable, compared to unreadable programming languages like Brainfuck.

Programming languages are designed to eliminate ambiguity and precisely define the logic so it can be translated into computation efficiently. English is way more expressive, but it's not something that was optimized for expressing formal system behavior or algorithms.

In most cases, the code is the shortest and the most accurate representation of how the system behaves. When we describe the system behaviour in a prompt, we often drop significant pieces of logic, assuming the AI will connect the dots for us. This tradeoff comes at the cost of precision.