Comment by abhijeetpbodas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abhijeetpbodas | Hacker News Reader

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On a philosophical level, AI for writing code has always seemed redundant to me. Here's why:

1. Humans create programming languages which machines can understand. OK.

2. Humans build tools (LSP, treesitter, tags, type checkers and others) to help humans understand code better. OK.

3. Humans build (AI) programs which run on machines so that the computer can understand... computer programs???

Aren't computers supposed to be able to understand code already? Wasn't the concept of "computer code" created so as to have something which the computer could understand? Isn't making a (AI) program to help the computer understand computer programs re-inventing the wheel?

(Of course, I get that I use the terms "understand" and "computer programs" very loosely here!)

As long as we don’t have „level 5“ code generation (no human oversight necessary), we need the code to be human readable. Afterwards, sure, why not produce assembly directly. Still it might be more practical to produce platform independent code instead - you‘ll only need to train one model instead of one per platform.

The benefit here is that the machine can execute what the AI produces, and humans can understand it / modify it if they need to.

It can be seen as a benefit or a cautionary tale. Earlier in the comments, someone claimed ChatGPT gave a recipe for a omelet made with 2 to 3 cow eggs. If instead of putting a recipe on the screen, the AI was connected to a cow and a frying pan...OW!

I'm not making a judgment or claim as to whether the technology is beneficial overall. I was just explaining the benefit of the choice of output being source code rather than an executable.

The impact of context in LLM performance makes higher level languages a must for AI to generate programs. The AI doesn't 'understand' code like a 'computer' does - it understands it like we do using text to express logic.

Arguably, we would benefit from even higher level abstractions so the LLM can fit more logic in a single prompt/output.

Good point!

Maybe a future AI could generate machine code that could be "disasssembled" into higher level languages.

Not sure if that would be better.

Yeah you do, machines execute code but don't understand it.

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