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While LLMs will move the industry to well defined specs in English that are used to generate code and tests ranging from unit, integration and end-to-end, I don
by williamcotton 4y ago
While LLMs will move the industry to well defined specs in English that are used to generate code and tests ranging from unit, integration and end-to-end, I don’t see the end of the role of humans in this process. I see the continued rise of the product engineer who is fully capable of interacting with stakeholders and customers while also having the time and energy to produce working software.
The singularity seems pretty far off and the current LLM techniques will change drastically over the coming years… Algol families exist but we’ve well beyond those abstractions.
One thing I’ve noticed is that LLMs will eventually run in to Syntax errors or other logical errors and halt on their own. I’ve been calling it the non-halting problem and intuitively it seems as though this will be a rather large hurdle to overcome!
There’s a certain amount of computational thinking required by a developer required to understand how the computer is interpreting code that seems missing from the capabilities of both LLMs and symbolic interpreters like traditional computers.
- redfloatplane 4y agoI think it's likely that the edges of generative AI haven't really been found yet. I think it's hard to say whether any given (textual) requirement definitively can't in some way be fulfilled by ChatGPT (or a similar LLM) without at least another several months of messing around. I certainly haven't made up my mind about what this might do to the world in general - more a question for science fiction authors than programmers, I think. In any case, I am fairly unworried (and more excited) by these developments. ChatGPT can't stop me from sitting on a mountain and eating a banana. Yet.
- williamcotton 4y agoI agree. My goal, which seems very achievable from my current research, is to write formal specifications in English and generate functioning code. One of my favorite recent projects is called Parsel: Parsel : A (De-)compositional Framework for Algorithmic Reasoning with Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10561 https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10561 Here's a notebook with an introduction: https://github.com/ezelikman/parsel/blob/main/parsel.ipynb https://github.com/ezelikman/parsel/blob/main/parsel.ipynb And here's a GUI interface the author has been developing: http://zelikman.me/parsel/interface.html http://zelikman.me/parsel/interface.html