In 2029, will any AI be able to construct "reasonably" bug-free code of >= 10k LOC from a natural language specification? (Gary Marcus benchmark #4)
The fourth question from this post: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/dear-elon-musk-here-are-five-things The full text is: "In 2029, AI will not be able to reliably construct bug-free code of more than 10,000 lines from natural language specification or by interactions with a non-expert user. [Gluing together code from existing libraries doesn’t count.]" Judgment will be by me, not Gary Marcus. Ambiguous whether this means start or end of 2029, so I have set it for the end. For this question I am not using the exact text of the question, because I think "bug-free" is 1. silly 2. untestable. I will instead accept if it produces code of >=10k LOC with <= the number of bugs in an implementation by a human (many small bugs for some significant bugs will unfortunately be down to my subjective impression of whether it's "better") I am also ignoring the "no gluing libraries together" requirement, because I don't know what he means. Does he want an AI that writes 10k LOC of assembly? I will accept code that is calling/using libraries at <= the rate that normal human programmers do. Sep 16, 2:26pm: Some additional clarifications: If there was a benchmark that, for instance, compared human to AI code, allowed both to ask follow up questions about the initial natural language prompt, allowed tests, allowed multiple submissions, etc. (so roughly the workflow of "human consultant is hired to write a ~10k LOC project") I will accept that. If there's an agent that can pass this for some "typical" coding tasks but not for highly-specialized tasks (e.g. it can write a website, a data structure library, or implement some standard ML workflows but can't write highly secure code or an efficient optimizing compiler) I will accept that. To frame it another way: if it can write small-medium projects that a median FAANG coder can do, but not projects that FAANG coders who implement research-level code can do (and non-research-level coders can't), I will accept that. (tbc I don't mean "research level quality", I mean "production/industry quality, research level difficulty/complexity")
