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This is a use case I could see GPT really excelling—porting libraries from one programming language to another. How awesome would that be? Newish ecosystems lik

This is a use case I could see GPT really excelling—porting libraries from one programming language to another. How awesome would that be? Newish ecosystems like Rust, Crystal, Elixir, etc. could have a larger set of libraries in a shorter amount of time. There’s still a lot of need for a human to be involved, buts it’s not hard to see how this will make individual developers more productive, especially as LLMs mature, plug themselves into interpreters, and become more capable.

weatherlite 4y ago
I don't share the enthusaism since it probably means humans won't be looking at code much anymore, at least not as a paid job.
- reidjs 4y ago
  The goal shouldn’t be to code, but to create useful software.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    The real concern is that code will become too incomprehensible to be debugged by most humans before we solve hallucinations etc (if they even are solvable) leading to bugs.
- chaxor 4y ago
  I am starting to think of this more in the sense that 'not many people write in assembly anymore' or 'some people write C - sure - but writing in Nim can be a nicer experience and can take care of some of the details for me' and it has been helpful for me to come to terms with the direction things are moving. Granted, this is a big step to higher level "programming" (and those quotes are now bigger than ever) but, as pointed out, these LLMs are even better when you know how to use the linguistic interface like a senior dev rather than a person off the street. Effectively, now devs can now work to make decisions closer to the C-suite by framing the problem and constraints, and spend less time on the frustrating errors while developing.
rmak 4y ago
By 2025, the entire WordPress library, including popular plugins, will be written in Rust/C, and it's inevitable that we'll be converging towards assembly language for all software, including web applications.
- melvinmelih 4y ago
  Indeed - why stop at human-readable code? At some point in time we will be solely reliant on AI to understand our own codebase.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Anyone remember Dreamweaver or Microsoft Word HTML output? I imagine the AI generated code will be a lot like that - massively over-constrained and over-engineered to fit the impedance mismatch of a WYSIWYG (what you speak is what you get) editor. You thought GUIs were bloated and slow before? Just you wait!
    - akhosravian 4y ago
      Is there something in particular that leads you to that belief?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - elwell 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085544
    - int_19h 4y ago
      I've been experimenting with GPT-4 to see how it could be integrated in video games for NPC decision making. After trying a few different approaches to give it access to the world state for reasoning, I found that it seems to do best when given a bunch of table definitions and told to write SQL queries against them; for some reason, it navigates object graphs much worse. Here's an example schema and session (the game here is Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, which is convenient because it's written in C# and it's easy to access and dump the entire game state in whatever format): https://gist.github.com/int19h/4f5b98bcb9fab124d308efc19e5309fb https://gist.github.com/int19h/4f5b98bcb9fab124d308efc19e530... Take a close look at the SQL queries it generated to answer the question. On one hand, it's very impressive that it can write a complex query like this as part of its reasoning in response to a question like "pick a bride for your son": SELECT name, age, clan_name FROM (SELECT * FROM people WHERE name IN ("Mesui", "Abagai", "Yana", "Korte", "Bolat", "Chagun", "Alijin", "Unagen", "Sechen")) AS potential_brides INNER JOIN clans ON potential_brides.clan_name = clans.name WHERE clans.tier = (SELECT MAX(tier) FROM clans WHERE kingdom_name = (SELECT kingdom_name FROM clans WHERE name="Oburit")) On the other hand, this is clearly far from the optimal way to write such a query. But thing is - it works, and if there's no way to get it to write more performant queries, the problem can be "solved" by throwing more hardware at it. So, yes, I think you're right. The more code out there will be written by AI, the more it will look like this - working, but suboptimal and harder to debug.

weatherlite 4y ago

I don't share the enthusaism since it probably means humans won't be looking at code much anymore, at least not as a paid job.

reidjs 4y ago
The goal shouldn’t be to code, but to create useful software.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The real concern is that code will become too incomprehensible to be debugged by most humans before we solve hallucinations etc (if they even are solvable) leading to bugs.
chaxor 4y ago
I am starting to think of this more in the sense that 'not many people write in assembly anymore' or 'some people write C - sure - but writing in Nim can be a nicer experience and can take care of some of the details for me' and it has been helpful for me to come to terms with the direction things are moving. Granted, this is a big step to higher level "programming" (and those quotes are now bigger than ever) but, as pointed out, these LLMs are even better when you know how to use the linguistic interface like a senior dev rather than a person off the street. Effectively, now devs can now work to make decisions closer to the C-suite by framing the problem and constraints, and spend less time on the frustrating errors while developing.

rmak 4y ago

By 2025, the entire WordPress library, including popular plugins, will be written in Rust/C, and it's inevitable that we'll be converging towards assembly language for all software, including web applications.

melvinmelih 4y ago
Indeed - why stop at human-readable code? At some point in time we will be solely reliant on AI to understand our own codebase.
- akiselev 4y ago
  Anyone remember Dreamweaver or Microsoft Word HTML output? I imagine the AI generated code will be a lot like that - massively over-constrained and over-engineered to fit the impedance mismatch of a WYSIWYG (what you speak is what you get) editor. You thought GUIs were bloated and slow before? Just you wait!
  - akhosravian 4y ago
    Is there something in particular that leads you to that belief?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - elwell 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35085544
  - int_19h 4y ago
    I've been experimenting with GPT-4 to see how it could be integrated in video games for NPC decision making. After trying a few different approaches to give it access to the world state for reasoning, I found that it seems to do best when given a bunch of table definitions and told to write SQL queries against them; for some reason, it navigates object graphs much worse. Here's an example schema and session (the game here is Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, which is convenient because it's written in C# and it's easy to access and dump the entire game state in whatever format): https://gist.github.com/int19h/4f5b98bcb9fab124d308efc19e5309fb https://gist.github.com/int19h/4f5b98bcb9fab124d308efc19e530... Take a close look at the SQL queries it generated to answer the question. On one hand, it's very impressive that it can write a complex query like this as part of its reasoning in response to a question like "pick a bride for your son": SELECT name, age, clan_name FROM (SELECT * FROM people WHERE name IN ("Mesui", "Abagai", "Yana", "Korte", "Bolat", "Chagun", "Alijin", "Unagen", "Sechen")) AS potential_brides INNER JOIN clans ON potential_brides.clan_name = clans.name WHERE clans.tier = (SELECT MAX(tier) FROM clans WHERE kingdom_name = (SELECT kingdom_name FROM clans WHERE name="Oburit")) On the other hand, this is clearly far from the optimal way to write such a query. But thing is - it works, and if there's no way to get it to write more performant queries, the problem can be "solved" by throwing more hardware at it. So, yes, I think you're right. The more code out there will be written by AI, the more it will look like this - working, but suboptimal and harder to debug.