[teddyh]

But maybe I did want it to remove the middle character! Using my training data, there’s no way for the system to actually know for sure what I meant. There is also no way (in general) for it to detect “outliers” and ask me about them, because there is no good way to know what is an outlier and what is not.

[vanderZwan]

You can modify the output of the program synthesis to fit your needs. See this CurryOn! talk from 2015 by Sumit Gulwani

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqV9BlxEG5s

[TuringTest]

This is why this kind of software should have an interactive 'feedback' function that allows the user to select among several, equally likely rules.

The experimental Lapis editor[1] did exactly this, by the way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapis_(text_editor)