DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer

> “I was sceptical [sic] because even in simple competitive problems it is often required not only to implement the algorithm, but also (and this is the most difficult part) to invent it.”

So AlphaCode can "invent" a solution after seeing 5,000 other solutions? I'm not clear, is it producing an answer to a unique question? Or is it doing the same work a single solution plus copy and paste could do?

Considering how many of us do CRUD tasks all day, every day, this might be surprisingly effective. The question is, will unique work take the place of those CRUD tasks we've all done 5,000 times?

This new role promises to cut costs without losing any developer velocity, in fact it increases velocity (see carefully chosen, unreproducible productivity paper on arxiv). It accomplishes this by allowing an auto-developer to guide an AI to generate code in line with industry best practices. Hype!

If there's an AI that when given inputs can create a super efficient program that calculates the right outputs, it would be an AMAZING tool in programming. The few times I need to write such functions, a ridiculous time saving would occur and let me/other engineers focus on the test cases.

Will such a program actually solve the need to have engineers? No.

Will such a program actually assist engineers with things that a computer can actually be really good for? Absolutely. 90% of the time a solution is good enough. The problem is when we need to optimize, but that's okay, we can have humans take over and figure out if the AI did something that could be improved upon, or if the problem space needs to be changed.

Point is, its a fantastic tool. Yay. Now let's figure out how to make practical usage of it.

Demonstration: https://alphacode.deepmind.com/

This is scary and amazing. What's next? AlphaCode writing itself? Super intelligence?

I'm not talking "scary" in terms of robotic overlords, I'm talking about companies possibly getting rid of programmers and the whole industry getting a lot more difficult to enter.

I can certainly envisage AlphaCode turning interface mockups into actual HTML code or HTML code generators - a ton of work goes into that and it's quite tedious and ungrateful.

I've seen many tools that claim to save dev time or make it so you don't need any devs and they do indeed take a lot of the chore out of it, but the remaining 20% is what takes 80% of the time.

It doesn't matter if you think you are doing complex programming that is not [yet] automatable: all the programmers whose job can be automated will be coming for your job.