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Comment by safek | Hacker News Reader

Are there any efforts to feed an AST into a neural net and see what comes out of it? Like a coding assistant that "understands" what your code does or something?

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I work in this space. We have some pretty sophisticated pilots in process right now for such an assistant. We can talk privately if you want to learn more. Expect to see a lot of this coming out over the next few years.

Can you talk a bit on how you convert the AST to your NN input?

Do you traverse the AST and send it to a recurrent net? Do you compress the AST into a different representation first?

Well there are always trade offs. NNs aren't very good with trees, too symbolic so usually compressing it into a different format is better. We have a few we use depending on the goal, but always looking for trying new ones since this really is the crux of the problem.

That's super interesting, would you mind emailing me at [redacted]?

Emailed! Thanks

used to work in related area, would love to talk: cammarata.nick@gmail.com

Reached out. Thanks for your interest

That would be superb to try, for now I can't wait for demos of what is possible with neural but it is way out of my depth.

@addcn sounds mega interesting what you are up to :D

Well I hope it can be made easier to digest. We've all but confirmed at this point that the knowledge needed to build an effective programming AI is not available in any corpus of source code. There's a lot of information brought out in runtime and understood by humans that's critical to the learning. Without strong collaboration between both humans and bots nothing practical will come of any of these efforts.

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