Goalposts

Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?

2020 JulyMayeulC

About what GPT-3 might do next, after it generated a presentation from a prompt.

Now I'd be interested to see GPT-3 trained on code samples from open-source repositories. Would it compile?

Could it output a decent implementation of an algorithm if you were to feed it the comment describing it? How about more general statements about input and output.

The holy Grail would be to code just by describing what you expect the code to do. A few plain-language (maybe a more structured subset?) sentences stitched together, the API glue autocompleted.

And for reverse-engineering? Train it on drivers, then feed it packet captures. Could it make sense of the data?

AI writes working code from a few plain-language sentences describing what the code should do.

Has this happened?

Yes 109 (87%)Not sure 8 (6%)No 8 (6%)

Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.