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Comment by anon_123g987 | Hacker News Reader

But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job? So it is possible, although humans make mistakes, too. Maybe fewer, or different mistakes than "AI", but still, fundamentally it's the same.

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.

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> But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job?

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.

That's my point. Without additional context, humans would make the same mistakes. Having all information that humans have, this AI could perform at human level.

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.

You are describing it as if the developer writing the regex/cron has no prior involvement with the app, project, or company and is brought on to transcribe a specification from English to code and nothing else. In that situation an AI-driven translator app makes a lot of sense, but that doesn't match reality.

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.

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