How AI based programming could work

In fact there is already a lot of solid work just on this subject:

* Learning algorithms from examples http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07275 https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401

* Generating source code from natural language description http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07211

* And, the most closest work to what author probably wants, a way to write a program in forth while leaving some functions as neural blackboxes to be learned from examples: http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06640

* Also there is a whole research program by nothing less than Facebook AI Research that explicitly aims at creating a conversational AI agent that is able to translate user's natural language orders into programs (asking to the user additional questions if necessary): http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08130 (there is also a summary here http://colinraffel.com/wiki/a_roadmap_towards_machine_intell... )

And deepmind is also working on conversational agents: https://youtu.be/vQXAsdMa_8A?t=1265

Given current success of such models, automating simple programming tasks maybe not as much research as engineering and scaling up problem.

There is a lot of exciting machine learning research out there nowadays. Almost all of this research is available for free from papers posted on arxiv. It is a really good idea to read more about state of the art before coming with new ideas.

Interesting part is that a smart computer could resolve ambiguities in a human description of program desired in a way similar to humans. Missing part to this idea is that unless it's perfect, it would need a way to explain choices and results and probably some dialog system to iteratively improve upon how it resolved ambiguities.

E.g, make me an app like Uber but for cats -> here is a version you can play with -> oh I don't really like the cat icon, can we change it -> sure, which of these would you like ; etc etc

Computer requires ever changing human context, and maybe could have individualized context. So it has to learn over time. The point is to maximize efficiency of getting things made: how little needs to be specified before computer gives you something you accept / how fast can you go from some vague idea in your head to working acceptable software.

You should at least be able to get as good as an arbitrarily large number of people who lived a very similar life to yours and were put in a time bubble where you could talk with them to have them write software for you, assuming they're organized very well and highly motivated and great programmers and all that.

A partial explanation is that I dont like the assumption that once work is being performed at higher and higher abstracted layers, that machine hardware, OS kernels, compilers and linkers, package and dependency managers, and all other systems software supporting high level programming paradigms (including AI based methods) are going to fall in line at the application layer.

As others said the use of frameworks and even higher level scripting languages with an ide is already a dumb-ai kind of human-friendly conversation with the machine.

A problem with driving this further down the road like the article suggests could be, that if i wanted to talk to the machine like i talk with other persons, the natural language used in this case migh not be very well suited to express what i actually want. I would need special definitions and terminology, and in some cases a general description would not suffice, so the need for precision in expression might stay.

The actual dialogue with the machine then might last as along as a programmer would have needed to program it. I could see how this might work for very simple programs (like for some uber-app which is not much more than a wrapper for a telephone call to the taxi central), but inherent complexity that other programs need cannot be simplified away by switching the language to a conversational chit chat level.