How might AI change programming? Interesting list of questions to think about

When the efficiency of use of an input drops dramatically, so the price of the product drops dramatically, the demand will rise, maybe enough to raise the price of the input: There may be a boom in demand for programmers. Nvidia stock may yet go much higher.

These are some great questions. Hot takes...

Will we never see another new programming language reach the mainstream?

Even at this point, you can drop your syntax into a prompt and LLMs can pick it up reasonably well. A better technique will to be to automatically translate a bunch of program and then use those to retrain. Similar sort of thing is happening with teaching LLMs math. What we're beginning to see is feedback between more analytical systems and "intuitive" pattern recognizers. It's all janky now, but results seem promising.

Will we see languages that are optimized for synthetic data generation? ... Will we change how we modularize code? ... When will we store the prompt alongside the code it generated?

I bet!

Will we see a melting of language servers and LLMs?

Again with the intuitive/symbolic distinction, there's benefit in delineating between creative and verification aspects of an assistant. Now I want you to try something new vs just check and refine what's already here.

Will techniques that trade code density for performance, such as loop unrolling, become popular because loops won’t have to be unrolled by hand?

Don't JITs already do this? I thought that was one of their superpowers.

Very interesting list!

• What will change once we start to optimize code and processes around code purely for the reader, because the writer’s a machine?

I think Knuth might smile at this one. LLMs make literate programming much more accessible now, because machines can now read literate programs, generate them, and explain existing programs (therefore making them literate).