I studied engineering at university and, like most of my contemporaries, found that I sometimes needed to write computer programs to do certain kinds of calculations. These pieces of utilitarian software were written in languages now regarded as the programming equivalent of Latin – Fortran, Algol and Pascal – and what I learned from the experience was that I was not a born hacker. The software I wrote was clumsy and inefficient and more talented programmers would look at it and roll their eyes, much as Rory McIlroy might do if required to play a round with an 18-handicap golfer. But it did the job and in that sense was, in the laconic phrase sometimes used by the great computer scientist Roger Needham, “good enough for government work”. And what I took away from the experience was a lifelong respect for programmers who can write elegant, efficient code. Anyone who thinks programming is easy has never done it.
All of which goes to explain why I sat up when, last year, someone realised that Codex, an offspring of GPT-3, a large neural network trained on vast troves of text gathered from the web that could generate plausible English text, could write apps, ie, short computer programs including buttons, text input fields and colours, by remixing snippets of code it had been fed. So you could ask the program to write code to do a simple task – “make a snowstorm on a black background”, for example – and it would write and run the necessary code in Javascript. In no time at all, there were tech startups such as SourceAI aimed at harnessing this new programming tool.
