A.I. Can Now Write Its Own Computer Code. That’s Good News for Humans.

Sometimes, the programs generated by Codex do not run. Or they contain security flaws. Or they come nowhere close to what you want them to do. OpenAI estimates that Codex produces the right code 37 percent of the time.

When Mr. Smith used the system as part of a “beta” test program this summer, the code it produced was impressive. But sometimes, it worked only if he made a tiny change, like tweaking a command to suit his particular software setup or adding a digital code needed for access to the internet service it was trying to query.

In other words, Codex was truly useful only to an experienced programmer.

But it could help programmers do their everyday work a lot faster. It could help them find the basic building blocks they needed or point them toward new ideas. Using the technology, GitHub, a popular online service for programmers, now offers Co-pilot, a tool that suggests your next line of code, much the way “autocomplete” tools suggest the next word when you type texts or emails.

“It is a way of getting code written without having to write as much code,” said Jeremy Howard, who founded the artificial intelligence lab Fast.ai and helped create the language technology that OpenAI’s work is based on. “It is not always correct, but it is just close enough.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/09/technology/codex-artificial-intelligence-coding.html