Very high quality analysis & writing. I greatly enjoyed the article, and agree with all the points (which doesn't happen very often). Thanks

It still stands. I do thing that there is a less ambitious use of AI that generates a lot of dumb code. My peek at industry suggest that it account for a significant percentage of the code out there.

One cool challenge for AI would be: can you migrate code from Python 2 to 3. (I.e. you have a specification, the original P2 code, can you guess the changes needed to P3 it?)

@Jan Probably unsurprisingly given how fast the field is advancing, there is already AI work on translating between languages e.g. from my colleague at King's Jie Zhang Leveraging Automated Unit Tests for Unsupervised Code Translation. It's a neat idea, but at the moment it's difficult to have confidence in the correctness of the output. Python 2->3 could be an interesting restriction of the problem where it's possible to have greater confidence. Still, I must admit that my personal bet is that we'll get more use out of current AI techniques' approximating nature in places where we can better tolerate approximations -- and I also suspect that there are probably more places where we can tolerate approximations than we realise.