[Bertrand Meyer] is a decided contrarian in his views on AI and programming. In a recent Communications of the ACM blog post, he reveals that — unlike many others — he thinks AI in its current state isn’t very useful for practical programming. He was responding, in part, to another article from the ACM entitled “The End of Programming,” which, like many other articles, is claiming that, soon, no one will write software the way we do and have done for the last few decades. You can see [Matt Welsh] describe his thoughts on this in the video below. But [Bertrand] disagrees.
As we have also noted, [Bretrand] says:
“AI in its modern form, however, does not generate correct programs: it generates programs inferred from many earlier programs it has seen. These programs look correct but have no guarantee of correctness.”
That wasn’t our favorite quote, though. His characterization of an AI programming assistant as “a cocky graduate student, smart and widely read, also quick to apologize, but thoroughly, invariably, sloppy and unreliable” resonated with us, as well.
Ultimately, we think we agree with [Bertrand] — at least for now. As he points out, the iPhone wasn’t well-received at first, but it grew into its own. This is the early days of AI chatbots, so perhaps they will get better. But, like any engineering project, you have to weigh the risk of being wrong with the consequence. Getting a quiz question wrong or putting a wrong hyperlink in a web page is an annoyance in most cases. Producing software that’s wrong can cost millions at the bank and l ..
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