Comment by peatmoss

I've pondered this myself without digging into the specifics. The phrase "sufficiently smart compiler" sticks in my head.

Shower thoughts include whether there are languages that have features, other than through their popularity and representation in training corpuses, help us get from natural language to efficient code?

I was recently playing around with a digital audio workstation (DAW) software package called Reaper that honestly surprised me with its feature set, portability (Linux, macOS, Windows), snappiness etc. The whole download was ~12 megabytes. It felt like a total throwback to the 1990s in a good way.

It feels like AI should be able to help us get back to small snappy software, and in so doing maybe "pay its own way" with respect to CPU and energy requirements. Spending compute cycles to optimize software deployed millions of times seems intuitively like a good bargain.