Let Machines Do The Machine Jobs

Machines translate natural language into the machine language

Back in the prehistoric days of software development (it used to be called programming back then), experts were programming computers by writing binary code. It was a tough job that only a few select experts could pull off. Coding was an expensive activity, and it was taking a long time to deliver working solutions.

Then someone came up with higher-level programming languages that enabled programmers to express their intentions using English-like statements. Of course, computers did not/could not understand those English-like statements, so a new brand of AI had to be created that would translate those English-like statements into a binary code that computers could execute. That AI was called "compiler."

At first, when compilers translated English-like statements into the binary code, programmers were curious to examine the generated binary code. They were worried that the machine-generated binary code was inferior to the hand-cranked binary code. But after a while, as compilers were getting better and better, programmers stopped fretting about the quality of the machine-generated binary code and just assumed that it's okay and it's production-ready.

Fast forward to today, where we see a new crop of AI tools that offer even higher levels of abstraction. Those tools can take natural languages sentences and translate those sentences into the English-like statements that comply with the familiar programming languages (the 3GL languages like C, Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.)

And of course, same as in the old days with machine-generated binary code, today's programmers are suspicious of the quality of the 3GL code generated by the machines. They feel the urge to go and examine the code generated by the AI tools. But just as with the old-time programmers who were worried about the quality of the generated binary code, but gradually learned to relax and let it be, today's software professionals will gradually learn to relax and let the machines translate natural language sentences into 3GL languages that will be production-ready.