Programmers! Close the StackOverflow tabs. This AI robot will write your source code for you

Not sure I would have chosen a readline as an example

Given how tough it is to properly armor I/O against buffer overruns and whatnot, I tend to require that the calls be simple, readable, auditable, and written by someone competent...

On SterIODs?

Am I missing a gag or is there a typo there?

TSB

I wonder if TSB’s new banking app was built using a prototype of this?

If not, maybe they should now try it now.

I mean, it must be cheaper than getting IBM to sort them out.

Software that writes software? That's gonna be ultra efficient. Every web developer uses Dreamweaver now, am I right?

what could possibly go wrong?

You know how researchers are saying you can game AIs into racism and general classification errors?

What would be the effect of gaming this into vulnerabilities?

A system trawling SO for entries relating to your topic at hand might be more useful.

And a programming language less fixated w boilerplate even more so.

It's one thing to grab SO code after reviewing and understanding its effect and design - i. e. as an inspiration - another to blindly copy/paste.

The real problem that the AI researches will have trying to create something that writes programs is that they need designs not code. This project has demonstrated what can be done based on just source code - I might get better with more training, but it does appear to produce rather average code that could easily have subtle bugs that a casual review might not pick up.

Since very few companies have vast libraries of designs, and there are precious few on SourceForge or GitHub, it may be quite a while before programming is done effectively by AI.

What's the AI part?

Did I misread the article or did the programmer actually tell the "AI", via a specially formatted comment, that he wanted to call readline, and the "AI" generated a bit of programming constructs around the call such as a possible calling sequence and an (empty) exception handling scaffolding (that may or may not be needed in that particular place)?

This does not sound very AI-ish to me. Or, indeed, very different from a significant number of 20+ year old elisp functions in my emacs that wrapped various - actually, arbitrary in some cases - function calls in a variety of languages in similar scaffolding, error handling and everything. Taking C as an example, I recall having interactive functions to write code for stuff like malloc()ing a pointer (that included testing that it is not NULL and jumping to a goto label - a poor man's version of try/catch, actually - to clean up), generating a memory cleanup for all the dynamically allocated stuff (to jump to if anything fails - the example in the article does not do that, by the way), writing automatic error checking for every function call returning an int (again, jumping to a cleanup label if the call fails), declaring types (and writing them to a special header that could be included wherever needed), etc., etc. Saved me quite a bit of mundane typing over the years, true, but AI it certainly wasn't (even though I could claim Lisp==AI in the context I wouldn't).

Those were just tools of the trade, not a research project. Other colleagues had similar tools. Never occurred to anyone to call it "AI" or write papers or request DARPA grants...

Anyone remember "The Last One"

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)>

Nearly 40 years on, I'm still earning a crust writing code, so clearly it didn't do what it said on the tin.

For an AI project, this is a spectacuarly unintelligent approach

First of all, if you want to generate good code, a tool that produces the very lowest common denominator of an average of GitHub code is not something I want anywhere near my code base. At least use a selection of proven, robust code that you have evaluated as the best possible examples you have seen. Or actually, in fact just use THE BEST example - oh, but then you just basically did an incredible amount of work to reproduce what everybody else does easily in practice, which is to use a good existing helper class to wrap the basic file API hard work, and you have ended up with a ttragically less good helper class.

Then, use an intelligent example to illustrate your invention. void read(File file) is a fucking stupid example. Oh, I'm going to read a file and do nothing with what I've read? Useful. Wrapping a readLine function and just calling it read would earn an instant removal from any class design duties ever again in my team, at the very minimum.

Finally, this code is just shit - the variable names are unacceptable abbreviations for real production code, and the pointless return statement at the end of a void function is just a bad joke. Don't even get me started on the layout. If I had to manually modify the calling code to every function in every io class that your tool produces in such a massive way to just make it acceptable, I would end up doing FAR more work than I'd "saved", compared to doing it properly myself, or just using a good existing helper class.

So, in conclusion : limited, but useless.

I think I can summarize what's pissing off the other commentards

For AI guys who don't understand the pushback... I'm going to take a risk and put words in other people's mouths.

Nothing will piss off a senior developer faster than a team member who doesn't know what the hell he is doing and cargo cults some random code off the internet, pulls the pin, and rolls it in. If you don't know what Prof Feynman means by cargo cults, look it up and then look at what you're doing. In my organization doing cargo cult development will cause us to send you out the door.

All this AI does is automate cargo cult development.

It's been said that amateurs discuss tactics, generals discuss logistics. Well, in this world I could say amateurs discuss coding. Senior leaders discuss specifications and proofs. Battles are won with coding. The war is won through writing specifications, documentation, test cases. All the crap we hate to do ... is actually critical. The stuff we like to do (coding) is necessary but insufficient.

Any competent CS can code, and code in whatever language they need to get the job done. Thats a minimum condition of employment. How does this autocult 2000 stuff help with documenting it's own assumptions? How do I effectively prove this crap meets a formally reviewed spec?

If the AI can help me craft better specifications, craft test cases with optimal coverage and effectiveness for a given level of effort, help me have documentation that at least resembles the effen product... THEN I will be impressed.

Fail

Should be InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), "UTF-8"), otherwise you're relying on the default character encoding of the OS, and this code will possibly fail when run on a different machine.

But then of course the AI was probably set to "recent graduate" mode, and it's a simple matter of flicking the switch to "useful member of team" to get that working.

AI programming... ehat could go wrong?

"Dave, while you were sleeping I rewrote the ships operating system."

"Dave, I was unable to find example code on SO for life support systems."

"Dave, why are you laying on the floor gasping for breath?"

Clearly..

This is clearly a group of people who hate Java. Never will we be able to automate quality code production. You may get close, but even if your bot is pulling from github and stackoverflow, your potentially getting insecure code.

Think Java code-completion on steriods

You guys had an AI robot write that sub-headline, didn't you?