The idea seems a bit outlandish, but I could easily see many coding jobs vanish. We wrote a performance-oriented library (a regex matcher) and invested huge num

The idea seems a bit outlandish, but I could easily see many coding jobs vanish. We wrote a performance-oriented library (a regex matcher) and invested huge numbers of person-hours tweaking and tuning and building new, faster subsystems. It's not a giant leap of faith to imagine a 'Gold' version (correct but not fast) being written by a human and most of the tuning/tweaking/test generation/etc being automated. I doubt that there is a simple AI approach to generate significant programs out of thin air, but I suspect a lot of the mechanical work of making programs fast/robust/small/whatever could be automated. Sounds like a fun startup, honestly.