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Stack Overflow banned GPT and ChatGPT answers. Here's an important part of that policy: "The objective nature of the content on Stack Overflow means that if any

Stack Overflow banned GPT and ChatGPT answers. Here's an important part of that policy: "The objective nature of the content on Stack Overflow means that if any part of an answer is wrong, then the answer is objectively wrong." https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy Every step in the evolution of programming has some degree of controversy and I think this is normal. We can read in history books (and maybe first-hand knowledge from a few senior folks on HN) how there was concern about moving from assembly to the first high-level languages. There will probably come a day when AI software is sufficient for common use, though it might take a while.

jmfldn 4y ago
> We can read in history books (and maybe first-hand knowledge from a few senior folks on HN) how there was concern about moving from assembly to the first high-level languages That's an interesting point, I'd like to hear more about that from someone. The issue here seems like an extension of that, but an order of magnitude more complex. Going from assembly to high level means being able to understand and trust another program, a compiler. We're still in world of high level programming languages. An AI system writing code, especially if the output is a binary artefact and not source code written in a high level language, is essentially a blackbox. How then do we verify the work apart from running tests? Running a disassembler? I guess the challenge there is to get something easily parseable by humans. Just thinking about current tech, I'd have the AI write some sort of byte code since reversing that (to Java for example thinking of current languages) is easy, and you'll get something fairly readable. Decompiling machine code to C is likely to be fairly unreadable. I think my preoccupation is that I want to be able to read the whole program, not just trust the AI system and a battery of tests. So what then is the role of the language and what languages (if any) do we need in this future world?

jmfldn 4y ago

> We can read in history books (and maybe first-hand knowledge from a few senior folks on HN) how there was concern about moving from assembly to the first high-level languages That's an interesting point, I'd like to hear more about that from someone. The issue here seems like an extension of that, but an order of magnitude more complex. Going from assembly to high level means being able to understand and trust another program, a compiler. We're still in world of high level programming languages. An AI system writing code, especially if the output is a binary artefact and not source code written in a high level language, is essentially a blackbox. How then do we verify the work apart from running tests? Running a disassembler? I guess the challenge there is to get something easily parseable by humans. Just thinking about current tech, I'd have the AI write some sort of byte code since reversing that (to Java for example thinking of current languages) is easy, and you'll get something fairly readable. Decompiling machine code to C is likely to be fairly unreadable. I think my preoccupation is that I want to be able to read the whole program, not just trust the AI system and a battery of tests. So what then is the role of the language and what languages (if any) do we need in this future world?