CODE

Computer classes for Gen Z aren’t cutting it anymore. More than a third (37%) of Gen Zers feel their school education didn’t prepare them with the digital skills they need to propel their career, according to Dell Technologies’ international survey of more than 15,000 adults ages 18 to 26 across Read more…

“Can editing code feel more tactile, like painting with Photoshop brushes?” Researchers at GitHub Next asked that question this week — and then supplied the answer. “We added a toolbox of brushes to our Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension that can modify your code…. Just select a few lines, Read more…

January’s Communications of the ACM includes an essay predicting “the end of programming,” in an AI-powered future where “programming will be obsolete.” But IT analyst and ZDNet contributor Joe McKendrick remains skeptical, judging by a new essay sardonically titled “It’s the end of programming as we know it — again.” Read more…

Matt Welsh is the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.ai, an AI-powered software delivery company founded by a team from Google and Apple. “I believe the conventional idea of ‘writing a program’ is headed for extinction,” he opines in January’s Communications of the ACM, “and indeed, for all but very specialized Read more…

Computer scientists from Stanford University have found that programmers who accept help from AI tools like Github Copilot produce less secure code than those who fly solo. From a report: In a paper titled, “Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?”, Stanford boffins Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Read more…

DeepMind’s new artificial intelligence system called AlphaCode was able to “achieve approximately human-level performance” in a programming competition. The findings have been published in the journal Science. AlphaCode’s creators focused on solving those difficult problems. Like the Codex researchers, they started by feeding a large language model many gigabytes of Read more…