...but once you get your "textual description" to be as exact as it needs to be so code can be generated from it directly, it will be basically indistinguishable from code.
>> I think we're getting close to strong AI there though, so I don't see it happening any time soon.
It's unclear which clause is meant to be negative or positive here. If we're close to strong AI, systems which ask clarifying questions would be close as well, no?
Sorry. To be clear: I think strong AI is "fifty years away" and has been for seventy five years.
So yeah, an expert system that can read a natural language description of a feature and ask questions until it has enough detail to generate the code is science fiction in my opinion.
Having said that, maybe it could be achieved in a limited domain, SHRDLU-style. But that's just a way to deal with the ambiguity by excising it.
It doesn't have to be exact, no more than your input to Dall-E should be exact. Give the AI some understanding of intent of the project, some automatic metrics that will check AI's job quality and let it optimise against it. If AI doesn't generate what you wanted on the first run, correct it and let it learn. Basically what you would do with a junior developer.
