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This seems like a good time to ask what the heck is the value proposition of a thing like this. Are people really going to use the output of this blindly? And i
by dTal 5y ago
This seems like a good time to ask what the heck is the value proposition of a thing like this. Are people really going to use the output of this blindly? And if they're going to audit every line - is that really easier than just writing the code yourself? Honestly, at best it feels like a machine for introducing pernicious bugs that "look right" but are semantically wrong. (Which reminds me - were any of the Underhanded C Contest entries in the training data?)
- TeMPOraL 5y agoThat's a very good question. On the surface, the idea seems to be helping people write code faster - but as you observe, properly auditing generated code is more work than actually writing it from scratch. Best I can think of in terms of real value delivered, is helping people with first drafts, breaking through the "staring at an empty page" problem. But even with this, I feel it's too risky compared to doing a StackOverflow search, where you can at least see some explanations, discussions, and other relevant context. It's definitely an interesting vision demonstrator - despite not being quite there, it lets us see that a tool like this that actually worked well (in terms of generating correct, explainable, license-respecting code) would be very useful.
- visarga 5y agoAssume GitHub designs a filter to detect similarities to the training set and displays an attribution link with the result, as a comment. It's no different from using a search engine to find the code and putting it in your project, especially that the code is public already and visible to multiple search engines. You are ultimately responsible, just like you are every day with Google. But the model has on average just 1 regurgitation in 10 weeks per user, so you can just discard all of them.