My takeaway from the article - the success of their language model illustrates what a huge fraction of our code is boilerplate.
Yes, it's helpful that the system shows bugs, but it does this, not through careful analysis of the control flow or subtle type analysis, but by "probability of each token appearing given the previous tokens".
If such a large proportion of our code follows common patterns, are we not wasting huge amounts of time writing and testing the same functions across thousands or millions of pieces of code? If we (almost) always follow a certain pattern, should not that pattern be embedded in a library or language, so vastly reducing the opportunity for errors or bugs?
Yes, it's helpful that the system shows bugs, but it does this, not through careful analysis of the control flow or subtle type analysis, but by "probability of each token appearing given the previous tokens".
If such a large proportion of our code follows common patterns, are we not wasting huge amounts of time writing and testing the same functions across thousands or millions of pieces of code? If we (almost) always follow a certain pattern, should not that pattern be embedded in a library or language, so vastly reducing the opportunity for errors or bugs?