4 ms·

One other question: can GPT-4 reliably modify code? In A Philosophy of Software Design the author points out that code is written once and modified possibly doz

One other question: can GPT-4 reliably modify code? In A Philosophy of Software Design the author points out that code is written once and modified possibly dozens of times, so ease of maintainability/reading is more important than ease of writing. I wonder whether a) AI can reliably modify code and b) whether AI can reliably write code that is able to be easily modified by humans. If AI starts spitting out machine code or something, that's not useful to me even if "it works."

vsareto 4y ago
It can do edits, yes. You can also generally specify what language to use so it shouldn't jump from C++ to assembly unless you tell it to. The bigger edits (refactoring things across an entire project) is out of reach because of the token limit. You could do it piece-meal through ChatGPT but that seems more tedious than it's worth.
dmm 4y ago
> so ease of maintainability/reading is more important than ease of writing. That may be the case now but in a theoretical future where software systems are generated by AI why would I bother modifying the old system? Why not generate a new one with the original prompts modified to meet the new requirements? In a sense the "source code" of the system could be the AI model + the prompts.