There'a an AI tool called GPT-3 that you may have heard about that can generate text based on its understanding of patterns in human language. Now it's being used to generate code from simple descriptions of what the code is supposed to do.
IT CAN TAKE years to learn how to write computer code well. SourceAI, a Paris startup, thinks programming shouldn’t be such a big deal.
The company is fine-tuning a tool that uses artificial intelligence to write code based on a short text description of what the code should do. Tell the company’s tool to “multiply two numbers given by a user,” for example, and it will whip up a dozen or so lines in Python to do just that.
SourceAI’s ambitions are a sign of a broader revolution in software development. Advances in machine learning have made it possible to automate a growing array of coding tasks, from auto-completing segments of code and fine-tuning algorithms to searching source code and locating pesky bugs.
Automating coding could change software development, but the limitations and blind spots of modern AI may introduce new problems. Machine-learning algorithms can behave unpredictably, and code generated by a machine might harbor harmful bugs unless it is scrutinized carefully.
I've been wondering when this would happen for many years. For example, a lot of programming, like writing code to hook a user interface to a database, is pretty routine. So is writing documentation for it, which is something that has been worrying technical writers for a while.
In the future, it may be a lot harder to get jobs as a programmer. This is likely to hit the offshoring industries first, I suspect.
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