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A big reason we have programming languages is because natural language is often ambiguous. ChatGPT does nothing to alter that. It's like the joke: The program

A big reason we have programming languages is because natural language is often ambiguous. ChatGPT does nothing to alter that. It's like the joke: The programmer's wife said: "Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk and if they have eggs, get a dozen." He came back with 12 cartons of milk. She said, "why did you buy twelve cartons of milk?" He responds "they had eggs" (there are rare features like this in some parsers, like dangling else, but they are considered design problems)

flangola7 3y ago
The executives deciding what software gets built are not writing code. The application goes from 0 LoC to production-ready machine code via only natural language instructions. Currently the intermediary processor are human developers, humans are adept at grasping what is actually intended and asking clarifying questions - but there's no reason this couldn't be done by a ChatGPT-like machine in the future.
- jeezfrk 3y ago
  There's a lot of reasons ChatGPT could neither ask clarifying questions nor get any examples of the clarifying questions nor interpret all the levels of code and purposes of code-that-was-never-written-before. Language does not handle most business process nor efficiency goal and even security restrictions. People and logic do. Little of that language (!) is in the written word. It is done mostly by failures and historic-obvious-cultural practice. Emulation does not mean 'comprehension' of all the purposes involved in craftsmanship of handling data for business or for even computation. Most AI-solved problems are search reduction for spoon fed problem areas of data.
  - vba616 3y ago
    Asking clarifying questions is not always socially acceptable! Then what? Some random things that seem difficult to get an AI to deal with: 1) Things that people expect you to know by observation, but not be told and not to say. 2) Things that people expect you to know/adhere to, in spite of being told something different. 3) Strategically creating the impression that you do or do not have the ability to change your course of action.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    The stuff you're describing are things GPT-4 is already adept at, much more so than writing code.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
akasakahakada 3y ago
Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk. And if they have eggs, get a dozen. Punctuation problem.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  No that's still ambiguous.
muzani 3y ago
Have you tried GPT-4? It asks clarifying questions when a request is unclear. I tried to trick it into running an infinite loop by giving it an obfuscated recursion for "generating squares" and overriding the exception that stops it. It informed me that the action would infinite loop (spotted it better than me) and suggested that I didn't need such a complicated structure to calculate squares. Then it proposed a tessaract formula that "is bound to the laws of physics".
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  My complain isn't with ChatGPT, but with natural language. Even if GPT understands what you want, this interpretation needs to be stable over time and there's just no guarantee of that, and further, if you're actually programming in natural language as the original post suggested, it's not immediately possible to inspect how the language is interpreted. This is a problem that humans struggle with too. The two ways you typically end up getting around this problem with a programming language; a subset of natural language that uses very short and terse sentences with a simple and limited grammar; BUY MILK(1). IF EGGS EXIST THEN BUY EGGS(12) END IF ... or extremely laborious clarifications on the exact sense in which everything is meant, as seen in legal text which needs to be immune sophistry and various adversarial (mis)interpretations. e.g. Locate, select, and acquire, through lawful means, one (1) carton of milk, being of a commercially reasonable grade, suitable for human consumption, and free from any defects that would render it unsuitable for its intended purpose; and In the event the designated commercial establishment has available for sale, (12) one dozen eggs, the Designated Acquirer is hereby further empowered to purchase the aforementioned eggs, subject to them being in compliance with the prevailing quality standards for eggs.

flangola7 3y ago

The executives deciding what software gets built are not writing code. The application goes from 0 LoC to production-ready machine code via only natural language instructions. Currently the intermediary processor are human developers, humans are adept at grasping what is actually intended and asking clarifying questions - but there's no reason this couldn't be done by a ChatGPT-like machine in the future.

jeezfrk 3y ago
There's a lot of reasons ChatGPT could neither ask clarifying questions nor get any examples of the clarifying questions nor interpret all the levels of code and purposes of code-that-was-never-written-before. Language does not handle most business process nor efficiency goal and even security restrictions. People and logic do. Little of that language (!) is in the written word. It is done mostly by failures and historic-obvious-cultural practice. Emulation does not mean 'comprehension' of all the purposes involved in craftsmanship of handling data for business or for even computation. Most AI-solved problems are search reduction for spoon fed problem areas of data.
- vba616 3y ago
  Asking clarifying questions is not always socially acceptable! Then what? Some random things that seem difficult to get an AI to deal with: 1) Things that people expect you to know by observation, but not be told and not to say. 2) Things that people expect you to know/adhere to, in spite of being told something different. 3) Strategically creating the impression that you do or do not have the ability to change your course of action.
- flangola7 3y ago
  The stuff you're describing are things GPT-4 is already adept at, much more so than writing code.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

akasakahakada 3y ago

Please go to the store and buy a carton of milk. And if they have eggs, get a dozen. Punctuation problem.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
No that's still ambiguous.

muzani 3y ago

Have you tried GPT-4? It asks clarifying questions when a request is unclear. I tried to trick it into running an infinite loop by giving it an obfuscated recursion for "generating squares" and overriding the exception that stops it. It informed me that the action would infinite loop (spotted it better than me) and suggested that I didn't need such a complicated structure to calculate squares. Then it proposed a tessaract formula that "is bound to the laws of physics".

marginalia_nu 3y ago
My complain isn't with ChatGPT, but with natural language. Even if GPT understands what you want, this interpretation needs to be stable over time and there's just no guarantee of that, and further, if you're actually programming in natural language as the original post suggested, it's not immediately possible to inspect how the language is interpreted. This is a problem that humans struggle with too. The two ways you typically end up getting around this problem with a programming language; a subset of natural language that uses very short and terse sentences with a simple and limited grammar; BUY MILK(1). IF EGGS EXIST THEN BUY EGGS(12) END IF ... or extremely laborious clarifications on the exact sense in which everything is meant, as seen in legal text which needs to be immune sophistry and various adversarial (mis)interpretations. e.g. Locate, select, and acquire, through lawful means, one (1) carton of milk, being of a commercially reasonable grade, suitable for human consumption, and free from any defects that would render it unsuitable for its intended purpose; and In the event the designated commercial establishment has available for sale, (12) one dozen eggs, the Designated Acquirer is hereby further empowered to purchase the aforementioned eggs, subject to them being in compliance with the prevailing quality standards for eggs.