If you asked me 20 years ago, or even 10, I'd have said it was total science fiction. I wouldn't have been able to imagine how to do it. If you asked me 5 years ago, I'd have vaguely said something about AI, half jokingly. At the time I thought perhaps the models could be trained so we can do test-only development and let AI trained on formal test cases generate endless code until all tests pass, but I didn't really imagine it would be possible to get a computer to take freeform written English (even in a tightly controlled manner) and produce functioning code.

Over the past couple of years I have seen increasingly fluent demonstrations and tried a few myself, and I have fallen off the fence and I think that with the pace that machine learning and AI assisted programming keeps advancing, this outcome is all but inevitable, as far fetched as it seems.

I was messing with the OpenAI sandbox over the weekend and it helped me generate several game design concepts from prompts similar to my post above that I could see myself being interested in building and playing. It's not difficult to imagine down the line with a few more advancements in this tech that the generated design could then instruct the code generator, fetch the assets, and stage the environment for a player or user to enter without ever touching a line of code.

I'm not close enough to the research itself know which of those problems are hard and which are easy, so I don't know if we'll see the first totally AI-generated "proto-holodeck" tech demo in the next 5 years, or the next 20 years, but I can't see it being more than 50 years away, and something tells me with the pace of things it will be much sooner than that, assuming we're all still around at the time to enjoy it.