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AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

newscientist.com

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Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#131

Post by hcs »

a-priori wrote: post #121
geophile wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't TDD basically provide a spec? Write a test, then let the AI generate a program that passes the test. If the program is still buggy, you didn't write sufficient tests.

A few years ago I read a post by Bob Martin about how you can solve code kata problems by applying a sequence of 'transformations' to pass one test at a time. His method is very mechanical... so mechanical, in fact, that I think it may be possible to automate it. So I started tinkering with the concept, and I've got a bit of a start on it here: https://github.com/michaelmelanson/autocoder What's there is very rudimen…

You might find Perelman et al's "Test-Driven Synthesis" paper interesting, it also cites that post as inspiration.

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~djg/papers/tds-pldi2014.pdf

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#132

Post by mk89 »

unprepare wrote: post #56
rorykoehler wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can describe something then you can just code it. I can see AI being used in an advanced IDE as an assistant. Just write your specs and let the AI build the app.

making people in an industry more efficient at their jobs == job losses for that industry. if one programmer can now do the work of 5 with the help of an AI, companies will quickly be hiring less developers. yet everytime i mention this, im told that "software developers are the one job that will never be at risk of automation"

I actually think that together with psychologists we are the only two categories of people killing their own job :) we really strive to automate and to use the component there etc. to make our life easier and write less code. However, as someone else said above, software engineering is not coding, this is just a subset. Our job eventually will also evolve, it's inevitable :) it has already, it will not stop certainly now.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#134

Post by nickpsecurity »

EGreg wrote: post #103
nickpsecurity wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In automatic programming discussions, one commenter said long ago that we already have people that deal with English this precise: lawyers. Such a model would basically turn programmers into people writing legal documents that the AI then turned into programs.

We already have language lawyers for implementing compilers. I think the right solution is to take away most of the "convenience" features. Most people don't touch all of them anyway because they don't know how they would interact. But everyone joining a team would have to learn them. Why do so many computer languages experience scope creep? Including C++ and JS.

Sort of. I mean that you have to write specifications gor programs in English so precise and literal that it's like writing legal contracts. Compiler writers don't do that except in language specs. They use codd. Closest thing, which would be used in addition to English, is using a mathematical notation like Z or TLA+ for anything ambiguous. That's standard in high-assurance development.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#135

Post by muyuu »

Any code or real results to show for it? I'm a bit sceptical about claims in papers because I've found a lot of overstatements in them. Even in those with easily reproducible algorithms, that when you go and execute them, they simply don't pan out in any remotely realistic scenarios.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#136

Post by mondoshawan »

qw wrote: post #87
mondoshawan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a technical manager, this actually isn't that far from what happens with teams of engineers. The less precise I am in describing the requirements of a system, the less correct solution is produced. This isn't to say that my team is incompetent or mindless -- far from it, I find them to be some of the most talented engineers I've had the pleasure of working with. Perhaps the solution to this particular problem is a…

I'm not saying it applies to your case, but one danger of specifying a problem in too much detail, is that it teaches the engineers to think less about the problem. From my experience developers often think of failure cases that the managers are not aware of, or have a simpler solution to a problem.

I, too, find this to be the case. There seems to be a happy medium of "you figure it out" and "it must do exactly this".

As a relatively new manager, I find figuring out where the balance is tricky.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#137

Post by unprepare »

michaelmrose wrote: post #124
unprepare wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes and each new tool or helpful framework reduces the total number of developers needed. Just because we have yet to meet the demand for developers, doesn't mean that that demand is not decreasing over time. software development is quite a young industry, so its growth can easily outpace the efficiency gains resulting in more developers, until it doesnt. Development as an industry will need to maintain stronger grow…

You start out with n amount of programmer time demanded from projects a b and c, given that you can do x with y number of programmer hours. So imagine that increased efficiency means you can now do 2x as much fantastic now you only need n/2 right! Not so fast now that you can do more with less d, e, and f are worth doing and n+ are now demanded. Basically simple economics says that decreasing price, the price for a g…

>economics says that decreasing price, the price for a given unit of work going down increases the demand for such

an AI costs nothing in the long term, so you are agreeing here that demand for AI produced software will rise more sharply than demand for human developers, because they are more expensive.

So if you accept that basic law of economics, then you must arrive at the conclusion that human labor will inevitably be outpaced by cheaper labor. the fact that that labor is coding seems to be where people get really stuck here. I dont really understand why this is where people get stuck.

the population of the world, and thus its demand for food has very much grown over time, and is still growing. Yet we have fewer people producing food than ever before. The reason for this is that the augmentation of technology outpaced the increase in demand. So we had fewer farmers making more food than ever.

similarly with software development, the demand for software will continue to increase over time, but the demand for human developers will inevitably fall, due to augmentations of technology enabling fewer workers to produce vastly more output. So we will have fewer developers working than we have, say, today[1], but those fewer developers will be producing orders of magnitude more[2] software

[1]im not actually trying to predict the inflection point of this growth curve as today, i meant this only as an example to make my point easy to understand

[2] where more could mean more complex, more efficient, etc.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#138

Post by michaelmrose »

unprepare wrote: post #137
michaelmrose wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start out with n amount of programmer time demanded from projects a b and c, given that you can do x with y number of programmer hours. So imagine that increased efficiency means you can now do 2x as much fantastic now you only need n/2 right! Not so fast now that you can do more with less d, e, and f are worth doing and n+ are now demanded. Basically simple economics says that decreasing price, the price for a g…

>economics says that decreasing price, the price for a given unit of work going down increases the demand for such an AI costs nothing in the long term, so you are agreeing here that demand for AI produced software will rise more sharply than demand for human developers, because they are more expensive. So if you accept that basic law of economics, then you must arrive at the conclusion that human labor will inevitab…

There is zero reason to believe that software less capable than artificial general intelligence will provide any non trivial software.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#139

Post by unprepare »

michaelmrose wrote: post #138
unprepare wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>economics says that decreasing price, the price for a given unit of work going down increases the demand for such an AI costs nothing in the long term, so you are agreeing here that demand for AI produced software will rise more sharply than demand for human developers, because they are more expensive. So if you accept that basic law of economics, then you must arrive at the conclusion that human labor will inevitab…

There is zero reason to believe that software less capable than artificial general intelligence will provide any non trivial software.

There is zero reason to believe it will not.

look i too can make baseless assertions.

Re: AI learns to write its own code by stealing from other programs

#140

Post by michaelmrose »

unprepare wrote: post #139
michaelmrose wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero reason to believe that software less capable than artificial general intelligence will provide any non trivial software.

There is zero reason to believe it will not. look i too can make baseless assertions.

I don't need to prove a negative.

It seems inevitable that on some time scale AGI will be achieved if we don't commit species suicide or bomb ourselves back to the stone age. It doesn't follow that AI less capable than AGI can produce non trivial software guided by non programmers. This requires proof because it has never been done in human history and thus without any examples it requires if not proof a coherent argument in its favor.

The most obvious flaw is that software that is capable of composing/improving software ought to be able to improve itself and with improvements in a finite amount of time ought to BE AGI.

This looks like the start of a great tool for people to find example code relevant to the current code. In other words new tools for programmers not a replacement thereof.

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