Just ask it to rewrite the shitty code you wrote in a language you barely understand to “follow standard best practices in <language>” or something like that and it will add advanced typing features, functional programming for iterables, advanced exception handling, proper concurrency handling, optimize control flows, use better equivalent functions, etc.
As long as you understand the foundations of these concepts in at least one language anybody can become pretty close to an expert in most languages instantly. Especially since most of them are C based and pretty similar
The output will sometimes change the logic but I mean that’s pretty easy to catch and fix
Rip C++ nerds that memorize the entirety of each releases manual to shave off 3ms in every single function
Become “pretty close to an expert” by… outsourcing the process of improving your code to a machine…
Even if it improves your code in that scenario, you’re not going to really understand what it’s doing or why. You can use AI as a shortcut for scripting, but you can’t use it as a shortcut for learning
Edit: Besides, we already have perfectly good static analysis tools. Just use a linter. Trying to use AI as a linter will just be worse and unpredictable compared to using an actual linter
But I’m not using it for learning. I already understand exception handling, concurrency, typing, etc.
But I only know the exact syntax for some languages
Now I can replicate the best practices for those concepts in a language I’ve never touched, and I can understand what it does because I know the equivalent syntax in another language and so I can also judge the quality as well
It’s even more confident when the new language is C based because I’m already familiar with other C based languages
Obviously it’ll never be as good as a person who spent time to learn the language by reading documentation and practicing but most cases it should be fine
I’m sorry but this just doesn’t match my experience. I have used greenlet, Node.js, asyncio, POSIX threads, kqueue, and uv and just recently I had to look at something that uses tokio (Rust) and I would never say confidently that just because I know the syntax of one concurrency library, that looking at a different language and equivalent library I can immediately judge the quality and understand what it does.
That is just not realistic
Don’t you know that all programming languages are the same, except each uses a different set of symbols and keywords? Since all languages are the same, we can use an LLM to efficiently translate code from one language into another where it will perform optimally. /s
“Computer, replace all the whitespace indentation with curly braces and put a semicolon at the end of every line, in order to convert my Python program to Rust”
Python also allows you to override what operators do meaning I can write
int.__add__ = lambda self, other: print("hello world") >>> 1 + 2 'hello world'And that’s totally valid code. Don’t think many other languages allow that, and translating that would be a mess.
It’s technically operator overloading, the wacky thing that Python allows you to do, is overload operators for base types like
intwhich I’m not sure if other languages allow you to do for base types.That’s what I meant, you can modify the behavior of code by directly over riding the operator implementation for base types. What it really reveals is that Python
intis not at all a Cintor really any otherint.Directly translating syntax without knowing that the Python type is so vastly different from say, the C type is a recipe for latent disaster.
This is true.
In case my edit didn’t land in time: what makes the AI approach better than using existing non-AI static analysis tools
Well my personal experiences have just been that the ML approach catches a lot of things the static analysis tool hasn’t. Those are hard coded by humans and there are dozens of not hundreds of ways to write any given function with identical logic. It’s impossible for static analysis to be comprehensive enough to catch and fix a code block more than a few lines
E.g. I had a super ugly nested try catch exception block for this new integration test I was writing. It was using a test framework and language I’ve never used before, and so it was the only way I knew to write this logic. I asked the LLM to improve it and it broke up the nested try catch logic into 2 top level pieces with timeout functions and assertion checks I didn’t know existed. The timeout removing the need to throw an exception and the assertion fixing the issue of catching it
I’m glad you’ve gotten some actual use out of the LLMs! My outlook is more skeptical because I’ve seen too many interns get stuck on projects because they tried to ask LLMs for advice (which they did not double check) instead of reaching out to an experienced dev. The word calculators can only do so much.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I definitely think LLMs are gonna absolutely destroy kids ability to learn anything, including coding if they use it like a teacher
But for those who use it as a tool to build and do instead of learning, I’m quickly starting to become a strong believer in its usefulness