A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code.

[adarw]

Summary

Codex, a new ai that can write its own code. its a massive project created by OpenAI. its soposed to help coders code faster and better, a guy called Tom Smith, tried it and says it very useful for coders to use. and is smarter than humans.

 

Quotes

Quote

As soon as Tom Smith got his hands on Codex — a new artificial intelligence technology that writes its own computer programs — he gave it a job interview.

He asked if it could tackle the “coding challenges” that programmers often face when interviewing for big-money jobs at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. Could it write a program that replaces all the spaces in a sentence with dashes? Even better, could it write one that identifies invalid ZIP codes?

It did both instantly, before completing several other tasks. “These are problems that would be tough for a lot of humans to solve, myself included, and it would type out the response in two seconds,” said Mr. Smith, a seasoned programmer who oversees an A.I. start-up called Gado Images. “It was spooky to watch.”

Codex seemed like a technology that would soon replace human workers. As Mr. Smith continued testing the system, he realized that its skills extended well beyond a knack for answering canned interview questions. It could even translate from one programming language to another.

Yet after several weeks working with this new technology, Mr. Smith believes it poses no threat to professional coders. In fact, like many other experts, he sees it as a tool that will end up boosting human productivity. It may even help a whole new generation of people learn the art of computers, by showing them how to write simple pieces of code, almost like a personal tutor.

“This is a tool that can make a coder’s life a lot easier,” Mr. Smith said.

 

My thoughts

this is cool! tho it might end a lot of coding jobs which isnt cool as already theres a lot of competition for jobs.  

 

Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/technology/codex-artificial-intelligence-coding.html

[tridy]

I think it also requires some context and what the tool says it is able and targeting to be able to do.

 

https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/

 

Quote

We’ve created an improved version of OpenAI Codex, our AI system that translates natural language to code, and we are releasing it through our API in private beta starting today. Codex is the model that powers GitHub Copilot, which we built and launched in partnership with GitHub a month ago. Proficient in more than a dozen programming languages, Codex can now interpret simple commands in natural language and execute them on the user’s behalf—making it possible to build a natural language interface to existing applications. We are now inviting businesses and developers to build on top of OpenAI Codex through our API.

 

Here is an actual demo of what it can do:

 

So, this is a great tool to replace the search-online-and-copy-paste daily tasks :). "Smarter than humans" - no, faster - yes. As it was said, it does not really write own code, it takes and adopts the code from GitHub. I mean it is not that it has understood the abilities of a programming language and can perform whatever you ask it to do. Understanding business problems and building systems and not doing just functional decomposition - that is still sci-fi for now.

4 hours ago, adarw said:

My thoughts

this is cool! tho it might end a lot of coding jobs which isnt cool as already theres a lot of competition for jobs.  

the last paragraph in your quote comments on that.

[DuckDodgers]

27 minutes ago, tridy said:

So, this is a great tool to replace the search-online-and-copy-paste daily tasks :). "Smarter than humans" - no, faster - yes. As it was said, it does not really write own code, it takes and adopts the code from GitHub. I mean it is not that it has understood the abilities of a programming language and can perform whatever you ask it to do. Understanding business problems and building systems and not doing just functional decomposition - that is still sci-fi for now.

Indeed. I tried a demo sample few month ago to see what code can the AI spew out and it was marginally more convenient than sinking your time in Google and Stack Overflow for solutions and examples, but the lack of context and author commentary was evident.

Speaking as a sysadmin and SQL/PHP developer for ERP systems.

[adarw]

1 minute ago, DuckDodgers said:

Indeed. I tried a demo sample few month ago to see what code can the AI spew out and it was marginally more convenient than sinking your time in Google and Stack Overflow for solutions and examples, but the lack of context and author commentary was evident.

Speaking as a sysadmin and SQL/PHP developer for ERP systems.

 

1 minute ago, DuckDodgers said:

Indeed. I tried a demo sample few month ago to see what code can the AI spew out and it was marginally more convenient than sinking your time in Google and Stack Overflow for solutions and examples, but the lack of context and author commentary was evident.

Speaking as a sysadmin and SQL/PHP developer for ERP systems.

my bad i wrote it in a rush, had to do something

[CTR640]

Probably a typo so I fixed it:

Quote

some guy called john connor, tried it and says it very useful for coders to use. and is smarter than humans.

 

[adarw]

4 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

Proably a typo so I fixed it:

 

what? 

[StephanTW]

meanwhile skynet is very happy with the progress and is requesting a new secretary named sarah connor.

I'd be more interesting in how well it would code and how many bugs it will create

[adarw]

10 minutes ago, CTR640 said:

Proably a typo so I fixed it:

 

 

1 minute ago, StephanTW said:

meanwhile skynet is very happy with the progress and is requesting a new secretary named sarah connor.

I'd be more interesting in how well it would code and how many bugs it will create

oh damn, im not good with movie references.

[Doobeedoo]

That is very nice

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 9/12/2021 at 9:29 AM, adarw said:

this is cool! tho it might end a lot of coding jobs which isnt cool as already theres a lot of competition for jobs.  

Nah, it won't. Programmers do a lot of googling our problems(i know its a meme, but still). It will rather accelerate how fast you write stuff. It might be useful for creating some basic components, but not good enough for real work.

20 hours ago, DuckDodgers said:

Speaking as a sysadmin and SQL/PHP developer for ERP systems.

php? that might be painful. 

[whm1974]

And how far is the New AI along? I doubt that this in anywhere near Skynet.

[Forbidden Wafer]

12 hours ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

It will rather accelerate how fast you write stuff. It might be useful for creating some basic components, but not good enough for real work.

Autocomplete on steroids.

[Biohazard777]

On 9/12/2021 at 5:59 AM, adarw said:

My thoughts

this is cool! tho it might end a lot of coding jobs which isnt cool as already theres a lot of competition for jobs.  

There always was a competition for dev jobs, junior positions... mid-level and seniors pretty much get to pick where and on what they want to work on.
So ok, let's look at it as a junior dev, can the AI replace that role?
AI generated code (in their demo https://youtu.be/SGUCcjHTmGY?t=1010 ) :

 

 

Even though I rarely have to write or review JS code, I know that keyCode has been deprecated for quite some time now:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent/keyCode

Spoiler

AI is suggesting/teaching us to do things the wrong way heh.

This mistake would easily get caught by a "dumb" linter, I find it interesting that it "slipped by" the AI ... Or perhaps the dataset they had it trained on wouldn't be good enough if it just had up-to-date code examples, but that is just a guess. Anyhow, it shouldn't be used.

That isn't the only issue with the code. It is not very human-readable, there is no structure, use of "magic numbers" etc. A laundry list of bad practices / programming anti-patterns going on heh. It wouldn't pass code review, and if it somehow did, oh boy would that be a major PITA if someone had to go back to fix bugs or refactor code generated by that AI.

The conclusion (based on what little code I've seen in the demo) is no, it can't replace even a junior dev.
I'm not even sure it is a tool I'd recommend a junior dev to use... like@DuckDodgersalready said, without context and commentary provided by Stack Overflow / programming forums a dev wouldn't learn nearly as much. As it is right now, the only use-case I see for it is some simple, quick and sloppy work.

I'm sure that someday it will be a lot better, but that day hasn't come yet.
There is more to programming than just writing code that compiles and runs approximately what you told it to do .

[Sauron]

On 9/12/2021 at 5:59 AM, adarw said:

Could it write a program that replaces all the spaces in a sentence with dashes?

On 9/12/2021 at 5:59 AM, adarw said:

These are problems that would be tough for a lot of humans to solve, myself included

 

This person and I have a different idea of what a "tough" problem is  not to mention common coding interview questions are likely something the AI was repeatedly exposed to in training.

 

This also raises the question: how do you explain to the AI what you want the code to do? It's easy enough when it's a character substitution (though using something like python it might be faster to just write the one-liner that does that rather than try to explain the problem to this AI) but what about complex or novel problems that you don't quite know how to solve yet? Actually writing the code is only a small part of a software engineer's job. Eventually you get to a point where explaining the requirements would look eerily similar to just programming in a high level language.

[hishnash]

On 9/12/2021 at 3:59 PM, adarw said:

this is cool! tho it might end a lot of coding jobs which isnt cool as already theres a lot of competition for jobs.  

 

speaking as a senior software lead.

If your job involves solving the type of problems presented at interviews then your job is pointless. These tasks at interviews tend to require you to re-impment algorithms that have been solved years ago and that no-one should ever find themselves solving again today.

 

You should just use the standard algorithm libs that comes with your lang of choice. 

 

The task of programming is not a challenge of re-writing existing solutions to produce the same output as these solutions already produce. The challenge is figuring out what algorithms to apply and then using these (from the standard libs) in the correct way together. 
 

An AI that can replace a programer does not need to pass an interview question but rather needs to be able to get a poorly described ticket from a PM/PO and turn around to the PM/PO and ask the needed probing questions to flesh out that ticket into something that is useable (eg `what do we do when ...?`, `how often do we expect to need to run this?` `why is this important?` the developer needs to know how to ask these question and how to understand the response as that will guide the solution they develop. The solution they develop will be a combination of stitched together other code already written by 10,000s of people but might also be them turning around to the PO and saying `well this is all great but we could also just do ... for us that would be so much simpler`. It is very common for those who are not familiar with the implementation of the project think that doing X will solve a problem for the customer when really you could do Y and doing Y is orders of magnitude faster and better.  

For an AI to do this it will not only need to understand the context of the project but also the users, how they are using the project and what they want to get out of it this is a level of General intelligence that non of the AIs we have today even come close to. 

[TOMPPIX]

implement this into an operating system, i want my own J.A.R.V.I.S.