I think there's a difference between communicating your intent to a machine, which is hopeless since it has no model of intention; and commanding a machine to reproduce something.
Ie., when you're managing your house you want something that can be communicated in an infinite number of ways, but the "AI" accepts a tiny finitude of ways.
However when programming it seems like we arent asking the machine to "write a function to do X", but rather saying, "def open-paren star args...."
This seems like a pretty trivial problem to solve.
> However when programming it seems like we arent asking the machine to "write a function to do X", but rather saying, "def open-paren star args...."
Click the link first and take a look at what is being showcased, because your comment is the exact opposite of what they demo when you visit the HN link.
You're right... So, yes, it will be largely useless (as shown) for actual programming.
But I suspect there'll be a subset of its features consistent with my comment that will be actually useful.
Programming, via Naur/Ryle, is always a kind of theory building. And unless you're basically copy/pasting, it's a novel theory of some area (, business process, etc.).
That's something where intentions arent even really communicable as such, since the art of programming is sketching possible theories as a way of finding out what we ought intend.
So this is another gimmik with maybe marginal improvements at the edges.
Ie., when you're managing your house you want something that can be communicated in an infinite number of ways, but the "AI" accepts a tiny finitude of ways.
However when programming it seems like we arent asking the machine to "write a function to do X", but rather saying, "def open-paren star args...."
This seems like a pretty trivial problem to solve.