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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

What tedious for you is essential for me. I take great care writing every line of my code. I'm actually paying for Copilot and use for repeating blocks of code. But that's a miniscule amount of time saved, like IDE autocomplete, just increases quality of life.

So far no AI written any substantial amount of not-completely-trivial code that I'd accept. And amount of time tweaking its output exceeds amount of time I'd spend writing that code.

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The question is, will this still be the case in 2, 5, 10 years. Is there a hard limit to how well these models will perform, or will we look back at "carefully, manually crafted lines of code" as we do now at punchcards.

Honestly I have my doubts that current programming could be replaced by AI (other than General AI that would replace just anyone).

Programming is a precise work. Every bit matters. One flipped bit could change things drastically.

Current AI works in a kind of imprecise environment. What astonishes me is that GitHub Copilot can't perform arithmetic. For example I just wrote:

    // 23.56 * 4 / 3 = 31.413333333333334
    // 1280 / 16 * 155 = 24800

Text after `=` was completed by Copilot. You can check with calculator that first result is correct and second result is not correct.

I've encountered similar issues with ChatGPT. It tries to work as calculator but it's not reliable.

I do understand that this particular issue could be solved by adding some special handling into that AI. But this highlights general issue: this AI is imprecise.

And this is major discrepancy between current generation of AI and programming.

Drawing images imprecisely is fine. Few weird pixels won't make it or break it. 6 fingers are weird but kind of acceptable. Writing selling texts imprecisely is fine. Writing software programs imprecisely is not fine.

I think that we miss some kind of absolutely precise AI. Built on logic engine. Which will never do false statement. Which will never make false calculation. But yet more powerful than static algorithms.

With that kind of AI we could invent new programming languages which would be extra-high-level yet this AI will be able to optimize those to very fast machine code. That could change programming drastically.

I'm thinking these tools might be better utilized for creating user interfaces. As you say, a few pixels wrong here and there can be easily remedied and has little, if any, impact on the functionality of the software. You could use an AI tool to get you 80%-90% there - which would be a big help.

With regards to coding, AI assistants could make an excellent intellisense. That would also be a big help. I don't need the tool writing huge swaths of the code for it to be useful.

Miniscule amount over thousands iterations... adds up

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