[MrDresden]

It is not just those who are working on hard problems who are of that opinion.

Good luck having a ML model understand a 20 year old undocumented dataformat developed inhouse at a specific research lab to be used in their proprietary systems which are also undocumented and are a part of a spiderweb of interconnected systems at that lab (I have worked at this particular lab).

It will be a long time (if ever) until a ML model will be able to handle these situations (and I hazard a guess that most of the worlds active code is something akin to this).

As a supporting tool for the software engineers working there, sure. Just like a linter.

[sgarland]

Have you tried giving it a skeleton example of said undocumented data format? I've created some arbitrary ones and asked it to parse them, and it succeeded.

[hackinthebochs]

>It will be a long time (if ever) until a ML model will be able to handle these situations (and I hazard a guess that most of the worlds active code is something akin to this).

ChatGPT can do that right now. Just provide it example data in the input and it can extrapolate the format and interact with this abstraction (i.e. describe the format, write code to it, etc). LLMs don't just remix data it has seen before, they perform in-context learning. This means abstracting out patterns in the input and then leveraging it in generating output.