Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sorenjan 23 days ago
Why are we having computer programs generate source code in the first place? Shouldn't they generate something lower level, like an AST or some computational graph or something? Source code is made to be written and read by humans, and is then translated into machine code via various transformations. In theory a program should look the same to a computer no matter which language it started out as.

We have decades of compiler research, static code analysis etc, why do these extremely complicated black boxes of billions of parameters have to produce readable source code as their main output?
2 comments
JadeNB 23 days ago
> Why are we having computer programs generate source code in the first place? Shouldn't they generate something lower level, like an AST or some computational graph or something? Source code is made to be written and read by humans, and is then translated into machine code via various transformations. In theory a program should look the same to a computer no matter which language it started out as.

Presumably because LLMs are trained on corpora read, and for now still probably mostly written, by humans, rather than on corpora consisting mostly of ASTs or graphs?

link
carlostkd 23 days ago
In 5–10 years there will be no more code written by humans.
link