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AI Microsoft Programming

Microsoft Wants To Apply AI 'To the Entire Application Developer Lifecycle' (venturebeat.com) 69

An anonymous reader writes: At its Build 2018 developer conference a year ago, Microsoft previewed Visual Studio IntelliCode, which uses AI to offer intelligent suggestions that improve code quality and productivity. In April, Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac. At that point, IntelliCode was still an optional extension that Microsoft was openly offering as a preview. But at Build 2019 earlier this month, Microsoft shared that IntelliCode's capabilities are now generally available for C# and XAML in Visual Studio 2019 and for Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Python in Visual Studio Code. Microsoft also now includes IntelliCode by default in Visual Studio 2019. IntelliCode has come a long way since May 2018, but Microsoft is only getting started. When it comes to using AI to aid developers, the company wants to help at every step of the way, according to Amanda Silver, a director of Microsoft's developer division.

"If you look at the entire application developer lifecycle, from code review to testing to continuous integration, and so on, there are opportunities at every single stage for machine learning to help," Silver told VentureBeat. "IntelliCode is, very broadly, the notion that we want to take artificial intelligence -- and really machine learning techniques -- and allow that to make developers and development teams more productive. "IntelliCode is really only at the early stages -- authoring and helping to focus code reviews. But over time, we really think that we can apply it to the entire application developer lifecycle."

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Microsoft Wants To Apply AI 'To the Entire Application Developer Lifecycle'

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  • Microsoft - making code monkeys more productive since 1975!
  • As if application development wasn't already racist enough [technologyreview.com].

    • This isn't AI, it's just trendy to call things AI. IntelliCode is just autocomplete, but instead of ordering the autocomplete suggestion list in alphabetical order, they order the list in "most likely to be used" order.

      They derive the list of "most likely to be used" from scanning hundreds of 'high quality' open source projects. How many high quality C# open source projects are there? I don't know, but apparently thousands.

      The 'AI' comes in by figuring out the correct context. They don't say what contex
  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday May 20, 2019 @05:36PM (#58625696)

    Is their software no bad enough already?

  • Marketing idiot: seems to be trending a lot these days.

    The rest of marketing: Let's stick this buzzword all up in everyone's business!

  • When it comes to using AI to aid developers, the company wants to help and eventually replace them at every step of the way, according to Amanda Silver, a director of Microsoft's developer division.

    We all know that is the ultimate goal. It's in their fiduciary interest to their stakeholders to maximize profits, and AI automation is the holy grail (right up until this, of course [youtube.com]).

  • What could possibly go wrong?!?

    mnem
    *Looking for the keys to my HK-Aerial bazooka*

  • For games and GPU code.
    MS makes the best OS for computer games.
    The AI will ensure the game graphics and sound get even better support.
  • To make developers into disposable cogs now that code.org is a conclusive failure.
  • Good luck with that. It would probably be easier to apply AI to the entire chief executive suite.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Will it incorporate blockchain? If it does, I'm in, otherwise there's some other mass of quivering garbage for VC to funnel their cash to
  • Visual Studio is becoming a strangler app [microsoft.com]. By collecting data from all the developers and developing the technology to perform more and more of the developers role, Microsoft hopes to eventually make the leap and supplant the developer altogether. But in the meantime, we will all benefit from greater productivity. And perhaps the symbiants that we are to become will learn to truly master this thing called software. Or the software will master us. Please excuse me now. I just got a comment on my Facebook pos
  • when the Linux kernel developers start using Visual Studio. Until then, I'm sticking with vim.

  • Then you teach it how to eventually alter its own code, or at least you give it the ability to figure out that problem. That is a major precondition for AI developing conscious awareness, which this project seems pretty transparently designed to try to approach. Microsoft has been playing God for ages, we shouldn't really be surprised.
  • Has nobody found anything positive about this? IntelliSense has been very useful when I was learning a new language and a new API environment. I am, frankly, quite surprised that it is not a norm for the coding environment to know what is the usual order of calling APIs ("seems like people usually open the file before they start writing into it"), what variables go into function calls ("you happened to declare a local variable recently that seems an appropriate type to put in this function call").

    As a geek

    • by unity ( 1740 )
      It is interesting, no doubt. It also sounds like a great way to introduce bugs if one is writing code based on statistical suggestions instead of actually knowing WTF you are calling and understanding it.

      I might just be curmudgeon; but I'm already frustrated everyday by supporting younger developers without the drive or ability to research, experiment, and solve problems themselves rather than asking for help for something that one can solve in minutes with a simple web search or critical eye.

      This s
  • If I were going to write an AI to replace programmers, I think Microsoft would be the last place I'd look for a 'training set'.

    That said, when I tap out bits of code, I do often wonder if there'd be a way to make a 'generic' program that can be configured a zillion different ways to do different stuff. Thus you wouldn't write code per-se, you'd write config. For example, sort of like Wordpress, which does different things, and looks different based on some config in the DB and a few files on disk.

    Having an

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