Developers, rejoice: Now AI can write code for you

A new deep learning, software coding application can help human programmers navigate the increasingly complex number of APIs, making coding easier for developers. The system--called BAYOU--was developed by Rice University computer scientists, with funding from the US Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Google. While the technology is in its infancy, it represents a major breakthrough in using artificial intelligence (AI) for programming software, and can potentially make coding much less time intensive for human developers. BAYOU essentially acts as a search engine for coding, allowing developers to enter a few keywords and see code in Java that will help with their task. Researchers have tried to build AI systems that can write code for more than 60 years, but failed because these methods require a lot of details about the target program, making them inefficient, BAYOU co-creator Swarat Chaudhuri, an associate professor of computer science at Rice, said in a press release.