If machines were amazing at Speech-to-Text, okay, sure. But while the capabilities are impressive, they still kinda suck at it.
I don't see how text to code would be faster than typing. And even if it is, typing speed is not really a limiting factor in the speed at which I can produce code.
But yeah, that is pretty close to amazing.
I kinda forgot about it after seeing that the Rhasspy community experimented with it, and it had issues with short utterances and a slow startup time.
This means it's an assistive technology, but hardly "a generational paradigm change in how to write code".
Yet, it hasn't stuck. I'm exclusively using Siri to set timers. Most people are like me, or don't use it at all. Some use assistants for googling factoids or something. Fidelity wise, it's really underwhelming.
It's not a social acceptance issue, because people would still use it at home, and they don't. It's a small chance there's some key UI insight missing (discoverability for one), but I doubt it. Even with perfect UI, natural language is quite flawed when you're dealing with technical details (see exhibit on variable naming).
Anyway, the chances of Github solving this in an exceptionally difficult subdomain, as a side project, seems like a... Let's say, long shot.
That said, the silver lining in all these billions spent on voice interfaces is accessibility. For some people, these things are a life saver.
The hard part will be open plan offices.
It’s bad enough that so many meetings are now zoom/teams and proximity to coworkers means you end up hearing their side of their meetings.
Just wait until all the devs are coding this way too.
"USER!! UNDERSCORE LIMIT!! EQUALS TWO THOUSAND AND FORTY EIGHT!"
Because in my experience it is very often like "Call Peter" -> "Today it's sunny in NY".
On macOS it still seems pretty good - I have carpal tunnel syndrome and by Thursday or Friday most weeks I end up using Siri to dictate not code but a lot of conversations in Slack, pull requests, iMessage, etc. In fact, I wrote this reply with Siri right now.
Now it's barely worth attempting, because it gets it wrong more than it gets it right.
Are either of those companies investing particularly heavily into voice agents? Certainly neither of them has anywhere near the kind of power of something like Copilot.
Also, a general agent is way different from one that's specific to writing code.
Code is much more constrained by language syntax though.
Even for the "call peter" example, while the input is easy, the expected range of inputs that Siri should handle and be able to differentiate it from is huge.
Of course this is still a problem for e.g. defining variable names, where you could say anything.
But yeah, something about talking to a device which gets things wrong all the time is ridiculously distracting, at least for me.
Sometimes I look back at the road after trying to workout what it interpreted and I feel scared how focused on the phone I became.
I would totally enjoy being able to tell my IDE to "call foo with bar and string hello there end string with a block of gee times two" or something, instead of:
foo(:bar, "Hello there") { |gee| gee * 2 }
Poland ditched a similar QWERTZ-based layout in favour of this: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Polish_programmer%27s_lay...
It's basically the standard US layout but the right alt (AltGr) is a modifier. So, for example, AltGr+A gives "ą".
I don't see why something similar can't be done for the Czech alphabet.
It probably could — we already can't fit all the letters with diacritics on the number row, so "ď, ť, ň, ó" are key combos. But as far as I know, Czech uses diacritics a bit more than Polish (e.g. for sounds that are digraphs in Polish), consider:
"Že se nestydÍŠ, nutit lidi psÁt ČeskÉ speciÁlnÍ znaky pomocÍ dvojhmatŮ!" — that's 10 modifiers just for the diacritics.
Having ALL diacritics as modifier combos would make typing actual texts even more annoying than programming is now.
Why?
> once github codepilot is embedded
Usually this kind of exploratory work involves a lot of Googling and copy-pasting snippets from Stackoverflow without putting too much time in trying to deeply understand things. If you get out what you want - great, if not, back to Google.
The problem with speech to code has always been that precise syntax is hard, but AI codegen solves that.
So, no, it might not take off, but I feel like if it does, then it means ai-codegen will become the dominant way code is crafted.
That would be paradigm shifting.
It’s inconceivable that it wouldn’t be.
I don't want to disparage their work, because it's really impressive, but "fill null values of column Fare with average column values" is closer to AppleScript than it is to natural language.
It solves the issue of trying to speak obscure code syntax like “close parenthesis semicolon newline”.
That’s enough to lower the barrier to entry for many people; I don’t know how good it is practically but it’s disingenuous to suggest it’s not offering a novel solution to an old problem.
Easier isn’t always better.
The biggest problem is that talking sucks. You presumably can handle voice input as well as is possible, yet here we are typing to you anyway, and for good reason. Even if the natural language part is nailed, you may as well type in that natural language.
I imagine it will bring some quality of life improvements to those with certain disabilities, but I don't see why the typical developer would want to go in that direction.
Why?
Can't really see myself working like this in an office, plane, cafe, with music on (my favorite way to code), in the house where my partner is also working. Then as others have said, editing might suck.
If it was a neural link then I'd be in agreement.
Also include some navigational hooks like "show definition" "go to symbol" and "what does this mean" if the compiler spits out an error.
VERY PROMISING, in any case you can just manually fill the gaps with the keyboard!