>> AI assisted programming is brand new. The field that studies the automatic creation of computer programs is called "program synthesis". It is a field that s

>> AI assisted programming is brand new. The field that studies the automatic creation of computer programs is called "program synthesis". It is a field that straddles multiple sub-fields of computer science, including AI (where research is usually on inductive program synthesis, from examples). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis It is also a very old idea, as old as computer science itself- or even older. Here's wikipedia, again: *During the Summer Institute of Symbolic Logic at Cornell University in 1957, Alonzo Church defined the problem to synthesize a circuit from mathematical requirements.[2] Even though the work only refers to circuits and not programs, the work is considered to be one of the earliest descriptions of program synthesis and some researchers refer to program synthesis as "Church's Problem". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_synthesis#Origin Even program synthesis from a natural language specification is not brand new. For example, here is the first example of research work on the subject that I could find on duckduckgo in ~1 second: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/NLPSynthesis.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... The fact that most people have never heard of all this before is not new, either. What is new is that OpenAI and Microsoft are marketing a program synthesis tool.