Scheduled tasks are hard enough to debug as it is. The last thing I want to do is add more indeterminism!
It was designed to be easy to fit most things into one line.
It can express pretty much everything imaginable. But it's not designed to do that easily.
Maybe it'd be better to come up with a schema that's better suited for expressing non-trivial crons - and converting that to & from crontab format.
English is also not the best language for expressing this type of thing...
We have created structured, unambiguous domain languages for a reason. Converting from English is ambiguous at best, impossible at worst.
Maybe an alternative to natural language processing could be pattern recognition from a number of user supplied examples, and its expression in an unambiguous domain language. That's also what programmers do.
No, I wouldn't say so. Even if the programmer is given the schedule from someone else (in English), they have additional context and can ask clarifying questions that this AI doesn't have.
One of the hardest aspects of software development is communicating with the customer, for humans and AI alike. But a translation from layman English to machine code has to happen, at some point.
The software developer has a lot of context with the app and project that cannot be easily passed into the translator (whether AI or human). Going from that state of knowledge to the code by an intermediate, compressed, lossy, ambiguous step of natural language is necessarily inefficient. Whether that translator is operating at human level or not is not the point, going through English is the problem.