Cross-link to where we had a small amount of discussion about the Wiliam Byrd video: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1622611291035500

Definitely watch the linked demo (currently on Twitch, I imagine it will be on YouTube in the future)

pretty impressive demo of natural language with very high level directives to code translation

One thing that stands out about it is is how much control the programmer is giving to the application in terms of decisions

but I like the idea of writing a very high level description of a game, getting working for it, and then tuning and refining it, either by modifying the code or refining the high level description\design doc

I'm talking about games just because that's what the demoed, and I work in the space, replace game with application, tool, etc.

Cool stuff, thanks for sharing! Agree that the specificity level should somehow be adjustable - you, as a developer, might want to start from defining high-level user stories and then, once you’re happy by the prototype, you might be willing just to define some specific pieces of logic to be defined by you yourself…

and I think Codex will allow for it, but I can't say for sure until I actually get my hands on it

Still it feels challenging to actually control the output of GPT-3 via prompts only with no fine-tuning, so maybe that won't be the case

My take is that they've made a (very) high-level programming language that only the AI knows the syntax for.

The immediate association in my mind was someone asking Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant for something, and rather than saying "I don't know how to do that" it does something else that sounds similar

I think that's spot on

the syntax is also non-deterministic, it will give you a set of probable solutions, which I guess with enough specification there might be only one of

^ This is so cool. I am huge proponent in using color-coded data tables, they just communicate so much more meaning than just pure figures in a table. Very nice to see this applied to textual statements. Thanks for sharing!

It wants to be backdrivable so bad 😜

What does that mean?

directly manipulatable from the drawing? - I tried a generic solution for something like that: https://szymonkaliski.com/projects/dacein/ - there's also https://glisp.app which is actually usable compared to my Dacein (but uses a different technique/mental model than I did)

xyzzy This one might be interesting for you. Literate programming?

Neat! I remember trying to use reveal.js to outline my codebase once 🙂 I think with voice over this extension could be quite useful. There were some youtubers trying to present complex projects like jquery but sadly that trend did not kick off. While this approach fixes code comprehension, literate programming solves the problem when such presentations and codebases go out of sync too.

True, the syncing part might not be as great compared to literate programming. From what I can tell, the extension works by annotating the Line of Code @ File. But the extension keeps track of code changes and updates the annotations accordingly. Simple.

An IDE for literate programming would be radically different, kinda like Scrivener which is used to write film screenplays. There’s also Leo editor. I think it is definitely high time for more tools like CodeTour that aim at code comprehension and not just code completion! It feels like intro.js but for code.

You could partially solve the problem of stale code locations by including git hashes in the location representations. Coupled with some visual indicator of how old a given line is in a tour, that helps readers/viewers gauge how much to trust the tour.