When AI writes the control code, what is left to get right?

The design.

Handing over a detailed design and getting code back is becoming real. How far the equipment industry will accept it is a separate argument; as a technology, it is here.

That does not remove the problem. It moves it.

• If the design is wrong, the code generator implements that wrong design accurately — faster than by hand, and in greater volume.
• The error is then nowhere in the code, because the code does exactly what was written. It is in the design, and no amount of reading the code will bring it out.
• The same holds for code generated from a model: code generates perfectly from an incorrect model too.

So the better code generation gets, the more the design becomes the bottleneck. Load accumulates at the least automated part of the process.

Building a model and proving that the model is correct are two different jobs. Modelling tools give somewhere to write the model, draw it, check that it is well-formed and generate code from it. None of that answers whether running the machine according to that model is safe.

Human-readable version: What comes after “design with models”

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