Do you feel like you have an amazing idea for an application but don’t know how to code? Thanks to an artificial intelligence research company named OpenAI, it’s now possible to translate natural English language into programming code!
Codex is an extension of another existing product by the company by the name of Copilot, a tool used with Microsoft’s GitHub code repository. With Copilot, developers were able to get auto-code complete suggestions, just like you get auto sentence complete suggestions in Google search. It was an already impressive product but now it has taken the technology to the next level, with the system being able to decipher natural language and turning it into a programming language for coding.
Suppose you want to build a webpage with three different sections of different dimensions and insert different widgets in them. Previously, you would have to code each and every line yourself using a programming language you’re comfortable with. But with Codex, you can simply write the command as English sentences, without any proper coding language syntax or indentation and the system would generate the appropriate code in any language (such as JavaScript, Python etc) for those sentences and try to build a webpage from it. Similarly, the user can keep adding more English sentences and build the webpage according to their own needs and at their own pace.
OpenAI has released the API for Codex which is still in beta phase. The company is encouraging different developers and businesses to try out their product and experiment with it to see how it goes. Codex is built as a general-purpose programming tool so it wouldn’t be a surprise to see it being used for different programming tasks in the future. If Codex is a success, it is going to change the future of programming and make it accessible for more and more people.