> First, I've never heard of program synthesis, and it seems like an interesting topic. Could you point me to some resources so I can learn more about it? I'll

> First, I've never heard of program synthesis, and it seems like an interesting topic. Could you point me to some resources so I can learn more about it? I'll leave it to the GP to give a lit review, but will say that CS has (always had) a hype-and-bullshit problem, and that knowing your history is good way to stay sober in this field. > We've also seen GPT-3 and other generative text engines create genuinely interesting and innovative content. Making things humans find entertaining is easy. Markov chains could generate genuinely interesting and innovative poetry in the 90s. There's a Reply All episode on generating captions for memes or something where the two hosts gawk in amazement at what's basically early 90s tech. > They can generate new, genuinely interesting content and connections. Have you ever dropped acid? You can make all sorts of fascinating content and connections while hallucinating. Seriously -- much more than when you're sober. Probably shouldn't push to prod while stoned, though. Art and rhetoric are easy because there's really no such thing as "Wrong". That's why we've been able to "fake creative intelligence" since the 80s or 90s. Almost all software that people are paid to write today is either 1) incredibly complicated and domain-specific (think scientists/mathematicians/R&D engineers), or else 2) interfaces with the real world via either physical machines or, more commonly, integration into some sort of social processes. For Type 1, "automatic programming" has a loooong way to go, but you could imagine it working out eventually. Previous iterations on "automatic programming" have had huge impacts. E.g., back in the day, the FORTRAN compiler was called an "automatic programmer". Really. For Type 2, well, wake me up there's a massive transformer-based model that only generates text like "A tech will be at your house in 3 hours" when a tech is actually on the way. And that's a pretty darn trivial example. There is a third type of software: boilerplate and repetitive crap. Frankly, for that third type, I think the wix.com model will always beat out the CoPilot model. And it's frankly the very low end of the market anyways.