[lawfulcactus]

Can you explain? I'm not an expert on ML by any stretch of the imagination, but you'd think with the sort of stringent logical coherence required to construct useful programs, it'd be a pretty subpar use case. Or do you mean smaller-scope tools to aid programming, like linters and autocompleters?

[whatshisface]

I wonder if you could find a representation for computer programs that eliminated all of the degrees of freedom that were syntax errors, leaving only valid programs. In a sense that's what an AST is but you can still have invalid ASTs. I bet it would be a lot easier to generate interesting programs in a representation like that.

[namibj]

There is cartesian genetic programming and some lisp-like models to encode a program as a tree where all combination are valid. Combined with recent work on convolutional graph DNNs, this might be a good approach.