Re: Chatbot -generated R Code

Gregg Powell via R-help <[email protected]> Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:27:34 +0000

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Humans who don't adapt to LLMs, or whatever form AI takes as it evolves, will be left in the dust.

People may just now be waking up to the fact that we're three years into a tremendous revolution, one of the greatest in human history. It follows the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution, the Information Age, and now... AI.

AGI is approaching. How quickly? Who can say. Whether AI can ever be truly sentient remains a mystery. But once it can adequately replicate sentience, some will ask: what's the difference?

As to the question of who judges what's acceptable from a coding standpoint: capitalism will. Corporations will. And the question of whether this is the future of coding is already behind us. It is coding now, and it will only continue to improve in capability.

Try Replit, Cursor, Claude Code. Humans are incapable of keeping up. AI still struggles with some of the most complex tasks, and it does poorly at orchestrating across large repositories, but it's improving rapidly.
Just my observations. 

Those who look down their noses at all this will be left behind.

All the best!
Gregg

On Tuesday, December 9th, 2025 at 6:32 AM, Hans W <[email protected]> wrote:

> 

> 

> SORRY if I missed such a discussion somewhere on R-HELP
> 

> For many years I wanted to write an R function that finds the closest pair of
> points among a, maybe huge, set of points on the 2-dimensional plane. I never
> did, perhaps considering the possible complexity of this task.
> 

> Now I found a book, among others describing the "sweeping algorithm", perfectly
> suited for the problem. And as a test, I questioned chatbots like DeepSeek and
> ChatGPT about such a function - and mentioned the sweeping algorithm.
> 

> DeepSeek, for instance, came immediately up with a complete, efficient solution
> and test cases that I checked with brute force. I can see that it utilized the
> sweeping algorithm, documented the code, and set up a help file. I made some
> changes, improved the code a bit, but still it is code generated by a clever
> chatbot, whatever I do.
> 

> Now I ask myself: Is this a correct and lawful way to write code in the future?
> I am not even sure DeepSeek may not have used an implementation of the sweeping
> algorithm that is under ACM license and would not be allowed on CRAN.
> 

> I wonder how one handles this matter? Will this be the future of code writing
> (for R and other languages)? I would really appreciate to hear your opinion or
> a hint to a discussion about it.
> 

> Hans Werner
> 

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