I may date myself here, but the first thing that popped into my head when I read the title of this post was this scene from ST IV: [this video] It's kinda funny watching someone without a background in CS repeatedly ask google/alexa/siri a question in different ways that you know isn't going to elicit any kind of useful response.
I’m working on something similar. The target market is the 99% of people who want to program ad-hoc domain-specific problems. For example, generating charts w/o having to dig through all the data sources (Wolfram Alpha does a simple version of this). Building a financial risk model for a client’s specific request (you have to be a whiz at Excel, python or some internal ide). Even for home automation, my mom can’t use Alexa’s awful app to customize routines. I don’t think the voice part is necessary. It’s easy enough to slap ASR on the front. But going from natural language -> full problem spec -> code is hard in the general case, but doable in well-understood domains. Why can’t Scotty talk to a computer? ( [this video] )
Star Trek illustrated the issue nicely in the scene where Scotty, who we should remember is an engineer, tries to talk to a computer mouse in the 20th century: [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more