AI still falls short on programming language design, Bjarne Stroustrup says

In the realm of coding, artificial intelligence has reclaimed the authority. But there are some domains where cutting-edge AI tools are falling short of excellence.

Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, one of the most widely used programming languages in history, in a recent podcast, disclosed a specific domain where AI-generated codes are struggling to make an impact.

“I think that in the field I’m mostly interested in (programming language design) — code will still be written by humans, and they will use abstraction,” Stroustrup said on a podcast.

“The examples I’ve seen of attempts for AI to generate code in this domain have not been successful.” He still believes that in this area humans will have the upper hand.

According to Stroustrup, AI struggles in critical areas and the problem is it produces more bugs and bloated codes, more security. These codes are nearly impossible to validate. The most dreadful thing about these problems is that even the most capable engineers don’t want to deal with these issues.

“The senior developers that would be needed to validate it — I’ve seen some of them starting to retire, because they don’t want to deal with the validation of something that changes every time you make a change in your prompts.”

Stroustrup also talked about the problems caused by AI-generated codes as slight change in the prompt can bring a paradigm shift to the entire codebase in unpredictable ways.

This is quite different from humans-made changes as when humans make changes, the change is always localized.

“If an AI writes it, you don’t actually know where it’s changed. You have to try and figure that out,” Stroustrup added.