Let's run a thought experiment. If we were to design a new programming language today with the primary goal of it being written by an AI (like Copilot) and reviewed by a human, what would its core features be?
My initial thoughts are that we would trade many of the conveniences we currently value for absolute, unambiguous clarity. For example:
- Would we get rid of most syntactic sugar? If there's only one, explicit way to write a `for` loop, the AI's output becomes more predictable and easier to review.
- Would we enforce extreme explicitness? Imagine a language where you must write `fn foo(none)` if there are no parameters, just to remove the ambiguity of `()`.
- How would we handle safety? Would features like mandatory visibility (`pub`/`priv`) and explicit ownership annotations for FFI calls become central to the language itself, providing guarantees the reviewer can see instantly?
- Would such a language even be usable by humans for day-to-day work, or would it purely be a compilation target for AI prompts?
What trade-offs would you be willing to make for a language that gave you higher confidence in the code an AI generates?
Even after that, it will exhibit all the same problems as existing models and other languages. The unreliability of LLMs comes from the way they make predictions, rather than "retrieve" real answers, like a database would. Changing the content and context (your new language) won't change that.
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