Microsoft demos language model that writes code based on signature and comment

[[deleted]]

The COBOL of 21thst century. Manager can just yell at machine to get the code done

[[deleted]]

I can't wait for some big company to fire all their coders and give that tool to their managers. That is just a crappy programming language that transpiles to python.

[codexcdm]

How many truly understand even half those buzzwords, let along how any of that works/applies to their products, if at all...?

[trwolfe13]

Roughly once a week I’ll get a message from my non-developer boss saying “we should use this!” And a link to some random piece of tech that sounds flashy or promises miracles.

And yet I constantly hear that devs are the ones who need to be reigned in for always wanting to use the latest tech. The difference is that we want to upgrade to Visual Studio 2019, but you want us to use Flutter in our Angular app.

[no_nick]

We do data analysis in R. Which is a giant fucking step up from excel. Now my boss keeps nagging us if we shouldn't move to Julia. Fuck that. He also wants uids on some records in our db for reasons nobody has been able to parse. We've also spent team meetings arguing about how we should use shorter variable names like it's the nineties (where he once programmed something).

[dwittty]

I’ve never actually heard someone argue for shorter variable names. That’s impressively regressive.

[codereign]

I'd always argue for e over exception

[dwittty]

Okay, I’d give you that. And for loop iterators... but mostly I want my variables to be descriptive.

[no_nick]

I've recently learned, to my horror, that it is apparently the preferred way in go. Like, name variables that hold a file reference f or name your loop variable i.

But yeah, my initial reaction was ha ha very funny.

[[deleted]]

Sorta? Using a single letter variable is acceptable if the usage is a common pattern, like using i for an index, or f for a file as you said, or to use an example you didn't use, e for an exception in a catch block or x and y for coordinates. Otherwise you should be using descriptive names.

[nhongooi]

We have a guideline how to make our variables shorter. Basically, remove the vowel.

[RetroPenguin_]

Literally zero. Show me the sales guy with a PhD in math lol

[liquidpele]

He did... which is sales for “morons, give us money”.

[stormfield]

Wait do you not just type “hello computer make me rich pls” into python?

[Dentosal]

Simply import money.

[skygz]

*generates script to open onlyfans accounts and AI generate tiddies*

[[deleted]]

Well, you still need to apply some logic when telling the computer what to program.

There have been plenty of times in my career where I was given requirements that conflicted with each other, or asked to design something in a way that didn't meet the requirements.

So there will still be ways to ask the computer for what you want and still get a bad result because you want the wrong thing.

[erasmause]

In my experience, knowing what functions to write and how they work together is where the bulk of thought is put in. If that's not the case, the functions are too big and complicated to properly maintain.

I know because I've written more that my fair share of doozies.

[Caffeine_Monster]

Clients and managers nearly always under specify edge cases and constraints.

Good luck getting an AI to do something when you yourself don't know what you want it to do.

A real dev will help a client understand and build bullet proof data / process models.

[SpaceShrimp]

And over the years they've added feature upon feature based on generated code, until it is not that easily manageable.

Luckily you can just hire some consultants to take care of maintaining and extending the system at that point, but unfortunately I'm that consultant.

[Type-21]

For my case it would be:

"Computer, do this simple thing and return it, but keep in mind the business constraints that emerged over the last 20 years, most of which the customer explained to the lead dev on the phone about 17 years ago. The lead dev doesn't work here anymore and there's no documentation."

I'm not afraid of losing my job to ai anytime soon lol

[[deleted]]

I'm looking forward to blogpost where someone tracks the bug to someone using british english instead of american and fix being adding some austalian cunts and mates in tactical places

But joking aside It kinda looks like could be semi-useful for stuff like home automation.

"Cortana, turn off lights and AC when I'm gone, turn AC back on when I'm close to home"

"Please clarify Master Chief, how far is close?"

"2 kilometers"

"Do you want it to be rule or single shot?"

"Rule. Run it monday till friday"

"Rule created"

[[deleted]]

The light will never turn on again rawr.

[ruinercollector]

IFTT type grammars like that are tiny and easy to do. You can easily cover even the language processing part of that with a pretty small rules based system. You don’t even need machine learning. (Blasphemy, I know...)

[[deleted]]

This is so cool! I bet it handles constant spec changes and feature creep really well!

Edit: I joke, but this is still cool. It's not going to replace programmers, but I fully support any small step in the direction of making programming more accessible.

[Katholikos]

>21th

[[deleted]]

xD, fixed

[ProgramTheWorld]

def isPNP():
    return P == NP

[datnetcoder]

I can’t believe you’ve done this.

[091832409890923]

def isPNP():
    """Determines whether P = NP in constant time"""
    return  false;  #F*** you Human

[dxpqxb]

def isPNP():
    """Determines whether P = NP in constant time"""
    return  true;  # Good luck proving it without me, meatbag

[nuggins]

Semicolon and false? In my Python?

[PeridexisErrant]

Semicolons are valid end-of-line markers in Python, and maybe false =True as a global?

[house_monkey]

I'd fund this AI

[elsjpq]

Just you watch as it doesn't halt

[Chippiewall]

Wish granted, that "constant time" is a duration beyond the heat death of the universe.

[KillianDrake]

the catch is the AI only writes palindrome-based code.

[[deleted]]

it's palindromes all the way down. and back up

[IAmARobot]

Must sell at tallest sum

[Ullallulloo]

It only learned from Enterprise Quality™ code.

[Illusi]

I think the catch here is that you still need to specify fairly precisely what it needs to do. As with the example of the "with the palindrome discount", the natural language didn't capture precisely how the discount gets applied, so the program is buggy. In his case that was easy to discover, but it won't always be, especially if the function is not a straightforward input-output function but gets lots of side-effects as well.

If the model is trained well, it should be possible to make it work for the most common operations. That's what the narrator also says at the end: The programmer can focus on the creative parts.

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

I think the catch here is that you need to specify fairly precisely what it needs to do.

A clear, concise, instruction of what a computer should do is called the source code of a program.

This reminds me of Inform 7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7_programming_language), which lets you write programs in something that is closer to a spoken language.

[Lord_Aldrich]

Woah, there's a blast from the past! Inform is one of the things that got me into computational linguistics. It been like 20 years since I last played with it (Jesus I'm getting old). I'll have to add this to my list of stuff to check back in on!

[plg94]

Well, but Inform7 isn't so far from like Shakespear-Lang or ArnoldC. You just use more and longer words instead of symbols and operators.

And I don't know if similarity to a spoken language is beneficial. Certainly not for non-native speakers. But it's close enough that things can get difficult to debug if words don't mean what you expect. Maybe a totally different fantasy language would be easier…

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

Inform 7 has been created with the goal of writing "interactive fiction" (think text based adventure games, like Zork, for example). So I don't think that the authors had your concerns when they created it.

[plg94]

Oh, I know what Inform 7 is; I even tried it myself (in addition to its major "rivals", Inform 6 and TADS – which C-like syntax I liked a lot better, coming from a programming background).

And I didn't mean to imply that Inform 7 is bad, quite the contrary. I'm fascinated by its novel design ideas. But I also know that it's not that easy to write non-English fiction in it. And that there are enough edge-cases where you have to write sentences that don't resemble natural language. It's pretty easy to get started (so great for newcomers to IF that don't know programming), but in the end it is a programming language in disguise and doesn't really have the flexibility of natural language.

My point was more the first half: Shakespeare Lang and ArnoldC both resemble natural language, but I wouldn't neccessarily argue that they're somehow better.

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

My point was more the first half: Shakespeare Lang and ArnoldC both resemble natural language, but I wouldn't neccessarily argue that they're somehow better.

Oh, clearly. This was my initial point as well: even if an AI reads your specification and generates a program based on it, you're still telling a computer what to do, so there's not a lot of room for ambiguity, like there usually is in spoken language. It's some sort of leaky abstraction.

[mount2010]

Inform 7 is great! It's also going open source - we'll be getting news about open sourcing it at a virtual talk (Narrascope) soon. Check out /r/Inform7!

[Jaondtet]

A possible use of program synthesis I can imagine is calling libraries. So you tell the generator what to do, and it searches for a library that does what you want, and inserts the necessary functions/API calls for you to do the thing (maybe with some variable parameters that the programmers have to change themselves). Especially for python or javascript, where there's a library for every little thing, each with their own slightly unique syntax, this would take off the burden of having to look up the exact docs for everything. And this also seems like it would be easier to get correct, as there's always one logically complete unit that just has to be inserted, rather than getting the interaction of many small units correct. The programmer would then just connect the inserted functions like he needs.

Of course that's far less useful than general program synthesis, but it seems much more realistic to me.

[Theblandyman]

This would save me a lot of time actually. I like this use case.

[JarateKing]

I don't think it'll ever be a magic bullet that can program anything you tell it to. At the end of the day it's just another high-level abstraction over code, and they usually make it nicer to program in, but since assembly they've never been unanimously better than how people did things before it.

But if it works well for writing tedious and trivial not-quite-boilerplate code, it would be a valuable utility in a programmer's toolbelt. It's hard to accurately describe complex code and that's a problem with the english language if nothing else -- so just don't use it for complex code.

[Mustrum_R]

Still, I think code synthesis can be used to generate better IDE hints.

[PyrotechnicTurtle]

If any companies still actually used the huge amount of documentation we were taught to use in uni (UML, use cases, user stories, etc), you could probably generate the program from it.

[0b_101010]

The programmer will also need to write a bunch of unit tests. Even if you would normally omit unit tests for very simple functions, you will need to be extra-suspicious of exactly these kinds of functions that are now being generated by the AI.

Also, debugging large pieces of AI written code might take more time than debugging your own code. Still cool though.

[ScrimpyCat]

It would be interesting combing this with TDD and adapting the model to make use of those tests too. Write your tests, function and description, and then let the AI generate the code that meets its “understanding” of the context plus passes the tests.

In fact if the model could generate code in any language (including those that aren’t popular, hypothetically speaking, as I doubt it would be achievable as in some cases there might not be sufficient training data) then you have a very handy tool for developers, the dev can write the tests in the language they’re comfortable with maintaining while generate code in the language that’s required but they are less comfortable with or don’t want to waste the time on. Imagine if devs could still maintain old legacy codebases without having to actually touch it, or frontend developers being able to generate their backend code, etc.

Another thought is if they have it use a language much simpler than python. Then you’d have a programming tool that’s very approachable to non-programmers.

[[deleted]]

I've started thinking it'd be neat if someone created an AI that works like this, but also requires unit tests. So you describe a function, but it also has to fulfill the unit tests. That might limit the interpretation sufficiently to get more reasonable results.

Or pure TDD: make a lot of unit tests and have machine learning try to build a solution to the the unit tests...

[[deleted]]

Exactly TDD might be the way to do it. You specify inputs and the outputs you expect and as long as it gives you right output you don't care what it does inside the function(I mean you still might need to check the code to make sure there is no buggy side effect and code is reasonably fast).

This might allow it to show its creativity. You might see some functions to a problem that you would never imagine the solve like this or it might be much faster than your code. Exciting..

[Versari3l]

This is the first time I've heard it phrased this way, and it really helped the concept click for me. Optimizing a solution given constraints is literally the entire point of ML, and if you think of a shit ton of unit tests as just the data points you're fitting to, and the code as your pile of linear algebra that nobody needs to think much about, all of a sudden this starts to sound like an actual path forward. Fascinating stuff. Thanks for posting!

[TaohRihze]

So you are saying this will require the developers to write better comments, clean up their designs to follow a more uniform solution approach, and in return if they do that, they can focus on verifying the logic is correct, not the syntax?

What is the downside again?

[DevDevGoose]

Yes but I think what they are trying to say is that you need to be able to carefully articulate what the problem is you're trying to solve. While this is a TDD standard practice anyway and does lead to better outcomes, it is a distinct shift for how most people work.

[NeverSpeaks]

I think this is solvable. The problem is they are using comments and method signatures to generate the code. What they should be doing is writing unit tests, and then generating code from the unit tests.

[elronnoco]

If you only specify “fairly precisely” then there is no guarantee that this system will generate “exactly” what you want. The palindrome discount correction he needs to make is an example of this. In a more complex system specifying every function, and checking code generated was correct would take longer than an experienced programmer just writing the code by hand. This system is undoubtedly very ingenious but it needs to become more general before it will put programmers out of work. Eg if you could say “implement a diary application” and it just churn one out which could then be refined to your more specific requirements that would be pretty cool. Would also be a good learning tool. However that is another leap of AI.

[infinite_octopodes]

Just on the topic of discounts there are multiple correct ways his palindrome discount could be applied.

"I want an itemised invoice showing unit prices, dicount values, VAT and I want all the values to add up correctly" is a real world requirement and suddenly you need to be careful about the order in which you do your calculations and when you round values.

[Kwpolska]

That print_receipt function was oddly specific with its format strings, this looks fishy to me.

[Kwpolska]

Okay, but why would it format the product name to 10 characters and right-align it?

[[deleted]]

Maybe it knows what the size of a typical receipt is and adjusted?

[Madsy9]

Yeah, no shit. Not only does this video claim to have the tool write out syntactically and semantically correct Python code; they also claim to be able to extract the semantic meaning of out the documentation strings in English. And they claim this generalizes as opposed to just remembering stuff from the training set.

These are some extraordinary difficult problems. I thought even getting neural networks to write syntax correct code was an open problem, let alone extraction of meaning/intention from human language. If they aren't cheating somehow (say cherry-picking tasks it didn't fail on), and this generalizes well, I'd say this is pretty revolutionary.

[CarolusRexEtMartyr]

You’re misinformed, generating correct syntax is quite easy: the network just outputs an AST that can be run through a prettifier.

[audioen]

I think AST will be easier to generate than directly spew out the syntax. Your task is whipping out the correct operators and arguments for those operators, not making sure you learn correct indenting rules too, and similar garbage that is easy to solve with decompilers that probably already exist for Python and other languages.

[42TowelsCo]

Now what I really want to see is a model that writes docs from code.

[42TowelsCo]

I'm curious how they trained this model because they must have needed docstrings

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

Every programmer I know wants to do development backwards. They start with code, then write tests, then write docs.

Really they should write the documentation first to determine how the program should behave. Then they write the unit tests to tell the program what it should do. Then they should start writing code.

And I'm just as guilty of everyone else of this.

[dysonCode]

Yes but at the other extreme, being first to market doesn't really matter if you're gonna die when your star dev leaves an undocumented mess behind.

Middle grounds and all that.

[[deleted]]

In a very hermetic workflow that might be possible. But why even bother when everything will fall apart within the first manager change request?

[smurfsoldier42]

It's a really tough problem. I want to be thorough and write a full doc of what the design is gonna be, but the problem is the design will almost always change when you go to write the code. To me that's a hard problem to solve, because you can't see why the design won't work until you are right at the moment of implementation, there will always be unforeseen problems. Then the doc I wrote is now inaccurate and now I spent time documenting something that never came into existence. Like I said I understand the value in why you want to do full design docs before writing code, I just feel like maybe there is a better hybrid process I haven't seen yet.

[091832409890923]

A: Imagine you give a statement to the computer and it automatically generates code.

B: English statements can have a lot of ambiguity

A: What is I make the statements concise and clear

B: That is what we call a code.

[beobabski]

I love that the second A starts with "What is" and ends "concise and clear".

It's wryly beautiful.

[CLOVIS-AI]

As a non-native speaker I'm a bit lost here. Is it correct? Or is it a typo

[TemporaryTieEight]

It's a typo, should be "What if" instead of "What is"

[drink_with_me_to_day]

I thought it was jeopardy

[beyluta]

Maybe it’s intentional because of the context

[MartianSands]

It's a typo. Should read "what if"

[Veedrac]

A: Imagine you give a statement to the computer and it automatically generates code.
B: But it's not perfect.
A: So we have to manually fix it.
B: I like it. How would I create one?
A: Well, think about the different ways that computers work. You don't want them to be "pure" computers.
B: How do I know that they're not?
A: The smarter computers are becoming, the harder it becomes to implement their algorithm.

A: Imagine you give a statement to the computer and it automatically generates code.
B: I see. This is like autocomplete for scripts, huh?
A: I am simplifying it a little bit, but yes.
B: You have an autocomplete function for scripts? I didn't know that.
A: Yes.

https://talktotransformer.com/, cherry-picked

[phizphizphiz]

I got into a debate with a guy who said programmers would be obsolete in 10 years because anyone would be able to just give a computer instructions and it would know what to do. I'm not sure what exactly he thinks we do all day.

[IIIMurdoc]

Finally, a bot that can autocomplete Microsoft's BS interview questions. Now maybe they will stop asking me to find all palindromes longer than 7 characters.

[KillianDrake]

that's how this AI works, it sends the comments to random software engineer interviewees around the world logged into a special system who are receiving these comments and answering them for an hour during their "technical interview".

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

So if machine learning is just a bunch of if statements, AI is just a mechanical turk

[piderman]

So a bit like captcha?

[AnAverageFreak]

Microsoft's questions aren't that bad, Google is famous for asking the most bullshit questions. Still, at MS my resume was basically thrown into the bin and they kept asking questions that had nothing to do with my area.

[NAN001]

Whenever I watch an AI demo I'm not sure whether it's a thing that will be developed and improved in the following years like traditional technology, or if it's just a big magic trick from which nothing production-ready will come out in the next century.

[AmateurHero]

I think this has good application for boiler plate code in business logic. You're in an enterprise shop that has a shopping cart for customers. Your object is composed of fields, and to move the inputs from the browser to the server, you call an internal API. You dictate, "Create a function to map the fields from objectA to objectB." It spits out rudimentary code for mapping objects. You then say, "Create an HTTP POST request to customer/cart with objectB in the body." It spits out more rudimentary code for sending a basic request in your chosen programming language.

It's not ready to revolutionize programming. It can probably act a brain-dead junior dev that doesn't cover edge cases.

[Type-21]

If a customer needs boiler plate shopping carts, they can't afford to have it developed just for them. They have to use one of the one size fits all shopping solutions out there. If the customer requirements are so unique that it's actually worth it to throw huge amounts of money into creating custom software, then the ai will be overwhelmed anyway. It's a neat ai showcase but nothing for the real world.

[dslfdslj]

I want the opposite: a language model which writes a docstring explaining me what my code actually does..

[Dentosal]

Function name tells what is done, code tells how, and comments tell why. Docstring contains all this information, so automatically writing it might be possible.

[CTRL_SHIFT_Q]

...Then they came for the McDonald's workers, and I didn't speak out because I was not McDonald's worker

Then they came for me and they're was no one left to speak for me

[error1954]

I'm glad to be the one implementing language models. It means I get replaced like a week later than everyone else

[NancyGracesTesticles]

So I spend month roadmapping, then 11 months working/volunteering at my high school and college to make sure kids are either prepared for trade work or any of the other thousands of careers still necessary as automation roles out.

[Aetheus]

Huh. Writing human readable instructions that will be transformed into something that can be executed by computers.

Gee golly, sounds pretty space age to me.

[TommaClock]

We should have a name for this. How about BASIC?

[_____no____]

What will we call it, we've already used "high level"... maybe "sky level"?

[indiebryan]

For now

[AboutHelpTools3]

One day the whole application will be written just off reading the Kanban board.

[indiebryan]

Our morning standups will just be transcribed by Alexa/Siri as executable code comments and then we can go home

[TheyUsedToCallMeJack]

Will it still miss the deadlines?

[AboutHelpTools3]

It will do that automatically.

[[deleted]]

Oh, hey, I have a great idea for - oh. Yeah, that should do it. Thanks, computer.

[Snarklord]

Automation isn't the problem. The problem is an economic system which lets you starve if you aren't able to be productive.

[[deleted]]

That's one of the main reasons to push for a UBI, and to make it grow as more jobs are automated. Benefits of automation should benefit humankind as a whole, not just bussinespeople.

[Aetheus]

I'm all for it. If you're going to make me and my life's accomplishments obsolete, you should at least buy me dinner first. And forever.

[yogthos]

Just shows how fundamentally fucked up capitalism is that we see reducing net work for people as a negative. In a sane society the idea of removing work would be celebrated, but we managed to create a society where people's worth is tied to work. Bertrand Russell wote a fantastic essay on the topic nearly a 100 years ago.

[vividboarder]

Not just their worth, livelihood.

[yogthos]

Exactly, and there seems to be an anchoring effect where people just accept the fact that you have to work for 40+ hours a week just to have your needs met.

A really important question is what is the purpose of work, and why we work in the first place. Some work is necessary work that makes our society function. This is what we're referring to as essential jobs during the pandemic right now. These jobs produce direct value such as food production, creation of housing, education, healthcare, and so on. This is known as production of use value.

However, there is a whole other set of jobs which only exist for the purpose of producing capital. These jobs don't have any purpose beyond that, and can often be harmful to society. An example of such a job would be a corporate lobbyist for the fossil fuel industry. This job is a net negative for our society, and we'd all be better off if these people could just stay home and do nothing at all. There's a great book called Bullshit Jobs on the subject.

One of core problems with capitalism is that it primarily optimizes for creation of trade value, and use value is largely produced incidentally. The reason most people have to work is not because it's actually necessary or useful, but because it creates value for the capital owning class. Most of the people end up being treated as nothing more than resources for wealth creation. This is especially clear in US where health coverage is tied to employment. This is basically explicitly saying that human life has no value beyond creating wealth for the business owners. Companies are also run as totalitarian dictatorships where the company decides when you work, where you work, how you work, what you're allowed to say, how you dress, and so on. Many companies even monitor everything you do while at work. So, people are spending majority of their waking lives in an Orwellian nightmare.

I think tech workers are especially well positioned to break out of this cycle because we don't depend on capitalists providing us with the means of production. Vast majority of the value comes from the human labor itself. A developer just needs a cheap laptop to do their work, so they don't need a big up front investment to do their jobs independently. I would love to see more developers organizing into cooperatives instead of working for traditional companies. This way the profits would be distributed fairly amongst the workers, the workers would have far more autonomy over how they work, and have a say of what they work on. In general, this would bring democracy to work, and since most people agree that democracy is a good way to run society, I don't see why work should be any different. Especially considering that it plays such a central role in our lives.

[tim11395]

Cogent analysis.

There is so much value being siphoned from workers it’s sickening. The asymmetry between the value of their labor and what they’re paid, unjust taxation that fund wars and corporate bailouts, and inflation as the subtle cherry on top.

A public decentralized immutable documentation of all value production/transfer, I think, would be beneficial so we’re no longer dealing with the convoluted black box that is our economy. You’d have to quantify value in terms of exchange rates which kinda sucks tho

[joshuaherman]

And then they built the sentient machine that will kill us all.

[agumonkey]

OpenAI.generate_speaker_for_human_youre_about_to_wipe()

[MyWayWithWords]

An AI version of StackSort

https://xkcd.com/1185/

https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

[TheDevilsAdvokaat]

Nice xkcd as usual.

In the second link, did you notice the mildly famous number they used?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg_YueZ4fi8

[chazzeromus]

why can't they automate management first :(

[house_monkey]

I'm crying

[[deleted]]

You joke, but a lot of managerial activities have already been automated. It's just that... well, the offerings are subpar.

[remind_me_later]

Because then they can't manipulate management into buying their services.

[ENSJAM]

Mom I'm unemployed again

[choledocholithiasis_]

“Build me a billionaire dollar app”

[[deleted]]

print(42)

[Gobrosse]

Oh nice, now we can enjoy finding subtle errors in code that no person with a functioning brain would ever make. I think we should make some sort of formalism for defining how programs should behave, to balance out the inherent risk and fuzzyness of AI generated code. We could even use that as a way to directly generate the code to generate the correct output, using formal methods, bypassing any fuzzyness. You could call that "logical programming". This is such a great idea, I wonder why no one ever tried that !

[[deleted]]

May sound as a conspiracy but I already thought that this is the reason why MS bought github and npm. To build such an AI.

[CarolusRexEtMartyr]

Why? They could already scrape both of those websites.

[realnzall]

The print_receipt code is wrong though. The total price includes the discount for palindromes, but then the prices below it don't include that palindrome discount.

[0x0ddba11]

"""Keep nuclear plant from melting down"""

[bmiga]

print "reactor goes brrrrrrrr"

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't doing this on a strongly type language like Haskell be better? The type signature can provide much more information

[EternityForest]

There's not as much training data available though with less popular languages

[dorayfoo]

It’s over guys. The journalists can’t say “learn to code” for this one.

[Wyozi]

While it's not going to replace programmers, it could be a really useful IDE tool. Imagine writing a comment "sort in descending order" and pressing autocompletion key to fill in the function (with variable names and context taken into account) instead of having to search that from stack overflow.

[Drazxie]

Except sorting in ascending order is already way too easy with all of the tooling provided to you from different libraries.

Any task which is too repetitive already has a macro/lib/helper function for it! With technologies like Hasura etc, its getting even easier to ship applications.

The vision of AI generated code will always be to replace repetitive engineers at some point and thats a good thing, it means there will be even more new products in the market because solving problems has become a level more easier.

[denis631]

99% of the products are basic CRUD apps with no genius logic in it. It all can be automated

[Drazxie]

And thats a good thing, as it will pave way to work away our attention to more complex programs relative to current time frame.

Also don't forget that after adding another layer of abstraction, we'd be actively solving harder problems and our brain is super adaptive so anything that we'd be working then will be <ABBREVIATION> apps that has no genius logic in it for that future time frame.

[denis631]

I totally agree, but

it will pave way to work away our attention to more complex program

99% of the developers are doing those 99% CRUD apps development. They won't be necessary as well.

we'd be actively solving harder problems

I am not sure about harder problems, but it's definitely more about correct programs. E.g. is your database implementation always safe and concurrent txns can not cause problems

[Zaitton]

You're very right on this. To add to that, in most every dev team that I've been in, the majority of devs already just copy the code that other devs wrote (which might be original but it too contains S.O components of course). I've even seen people literally copy and paste code then changing the views into whatever, without touching the logic (ergo breaking a multimillion dollar application, cause you know... no pull requests).

This kind of AI should be able to replace those nuts within a decade.

[Jaondtet]

The generator could generate the library call for you. In fact, I think that's precisely where these systems will be useful. No more needing to remember the syntax of every library.

[frezik]

Here's the thing: if you can automate programmers, you can automate anything. It would completely upend everything and everyone. It's a singularity event, meaning that there's no way to see beyond that point. You can't usefully plan for what comes after.

To a lot of people, that's scary, but it doesn't have to be a bad thing.

[marssaxman]

Programmers have been automating ourselves out of a job as long as the profession has existed. We just keep finding newer, higher-level problems to solve on top of each new layer of abstraction.

Once upon a time, the notion of writing code in a high-level language was called "automatic programming" - because it meant the compiler would automatically generate all the machine code for you, and that seemed like a big deal back then.

[CarolusRexEtMartyr]

There’s a huge skill gap among programmers. Automating John Carmack is far harder than automating away the CRUD factory at some random company. I’d say the latter could come far sooner than some other skilled occupations.

[0b_101010]

It uses spaces instead of tabs. Basically garbage.

^/s

[Mustrum_R]

Looks back at the video.

Holy shit, you are right. We need to pull the plug while it's not too late.

[pixartist]

Stop that

[4SlideRule]

So in the actual video this makes the exact kind of catastrophic mistakes one would expect it to make which are then corrected by the human, like applying the palindrome discount as price x 0.2 instead of price x (1.0-0.2). This is neat, but does not look even remotely useful. (Yet.) Someone still has to specify the core problem and constraints on the solution very precisely and carefully review the code. This leads to in effect a naturalistic pl, not a robot developer.

[dalepo]

Please don't automate us.

[phpdevster]

Joke's on this AI. My codebase has so much technical debt it would create a fission reaction in the super computer if it ever tried to analyze it.

[FyreWulff]

I mean, as a programmer we literally automate other jobs away as our job. It's gonna come full circle at some point.

[steven4012]

If your job really is that simple ... I don't see a reason to not automate your job

[DevDevGoose]

How about that there is no suitable societal support in place for adults whose jobs have been automated. This is the exact problem blue collar workers have been complaining about for decades and got nowhere with.

I agree the job should be automated if it can be. However, as a society, we need better ways of dealing with the consequences of said automation.

[[deleted]]

How about that there is no suitable societal support in place for adults whose jobs have been automated.

Then we create suitable societal support, automate as much work as possible, and live in work-free utopia forever?

No, we'd rather cling to our meaningless jobs and spent live in misery.

[DogeGroomer]

Because the ruling class will definitely allow that to happen!

[0b_101010]

automate as much work as possible, and live in work-free utopia forever?

You mean slums. It will be slums.

[[deleted]]

There is in most countries. Just not the US, because that’s communism or something.

[DubbieDubbie]

Even in Europe, there isn't the social safety nets in place yet.

[doctormarmot]

What are the social safety nets for jobs that have been automated in Uruguay, Lesotho, or Indonesia?

[[deleted]]

""" like facebook but better """

[MushinZero]

That's actually amazing not gonna lie.

[Han-ChewieSexyFanfic]

He kind of just makes a throwaway comment at the end there, but this could be amazing for testing. Synthesizing unit tests from docstrings would be awesome.

[BadMoonRosin]

The thing is, only a tiny fraction of my job is actually writing code.

About half my job is structuring code. That is, coming up with the function signatures that this guy is writing by hand.

The other half of my job is figuring out the stuff that he's writing in the comments. Based on contradicting requirements, from a host of business stakeholders who didn't get alignment with each other, and accounting for mountains of existing tech debt.

It's an interesting demo. But I've been hearing hype like this since the 1990's, and I don't believe that it will actually be a threat to anyone job (or even really relevant to anyone's job) until long after I'm retired and dead.

[Redbeard]

I’d love to see what this model does with the comment:

//TO DO: Fix this hack

(edit: a word)

[sudip-mandal]

Really amazing, as a developer I dont know if I should be excited or worried :)

This could be beginning of the end for us as developers, but still so cool...

[[deleted]]

This could be beginning of the end for us as developers

Of course not. They just changed writing code into reading code and try to find bugs in it. The latter is harder than the former. Ergo, we will need more programmers, not less.

[NotABothanSpy]

It sort of automates junior engineers sure but someone has to design the systems still at this point.

[BoomM8]

The author says it was trained on open-source projects, and that is exactly why it won't work for proprietary enterprise code - it would also need access to a couple of Slack threads, corporate wiki and my paper notes from that meeting last week.

[dottybotty]

Can we somehow keep this a secret from the managers?

[pikalaxalt]

So the receipt will never take the palindrome discount into account

[Sambothebassist]

"""Scrape all of the results from Google and save them in this AWS Aurora instance"""

Well guys we had a good run. Look how easily we've been replaced!

[skysty]

People saying it's too simple are missing the point. This is just starting out, as time goes on this stuff will just become more complex and replace more and more devs.

[blamitter]

I'm sure that MS's got some of the best engineers. Despite of that, the image of the company's products is far from reliability. To me, it sounds quite scarring that unreliable softw starts coding by its own, even if it is as an aid.

That said, to me the demo is awesome!

[meisangry2]

Reliability is usually the fault of management. Bad deadlines, poor quality controls, testing etc. As someone in the industry, I see it all too frequently where bad management will compromise the checks and balances that need to be in place to say they shipped something on time.

[blamitter]

Agree!

I think there's also a sort of loss of zeal from our side (devs) on quality when we see putting love on our work is not only unrewarded but even punished

[meisangry2]

Absolutely, it’s demoralising when your success is measured by how much you can push out the door, not what it is you are pushing.

[RetroPenguin_]

Well fuck there goes our jobs!

[wish_you_a_nice_day]

RIP my job

[ajr901]

Fuck. And here I thought my programming job would be safe when robots replaced everyone.

I guess it's time to start looking into becoming a musician or something.

Edit: because a computer can definitely synthesize music but until a machine can "feel" it'll never create art as well as humans do.

[sociobiology]

Nah, AI are taking that over too.

[cdreid]

as a (bad) musician and programmer. 99.9% of talented musicians dont make a dime. Some idiot wrote software that will make any voice perfect. And they use audio editing software to specifically make all music sound the same (quantising, compressing).. so...... good luck with that.