<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://notacult.social/@carbontwelve" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>carbontwelve</span></a></span> I used machine learning in my PhD. The use case there was data prefetching. This was an ideal task for ML, because the benefits of a correct answer were high and the cost of an incorrect answer were low. In the worst case, your prefetching evicts something from cache that you need later, but a 60% accuracy in predictions is a big overall improvement.</p><p>Programming is the opposite. The benefits of being able to generate correct code faster 80% of the time are small but the costs of generating incorrect code even 1% of the time are high. The entire shift-left movement is about finding and preventing bugs earlier.</p>