Facebook has “simulating developer communities” in their sights

In a recent (April, 2020) paper called WES: Agent-based User Interaction Simulation on Real Infrastructure, Facebook engineers describe a population of ghost users on their platform: bots that simulate the behaviour of real users, but that are partitioned from actual interaction with real users. Within this paper, they position “Simulating Developer Communities” as a possible direction for future work:

Although this paper has focused on [Web-Enabled Simulation] for social media users, a possible avenue for other WES systems lies in simulation of developer communities. This is a potential new avenue for the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) research community. The challenge is to mine information that can be usefully employed to train bots to behave like developers, thereby exploring emergent developer community properties using WES approaches. This may have applications to and benefit from MSR. It is also related to topics such as App Store analysis, for which the community combines developers and users, and to software ecosystems, which combine diverse developer subcommunities.

There’s no specific indication that they actually plan to work on this problem — however, they could also be using the future work section to call their shots. In particular, the paper’s lead author, John Ahlgren , wrote a 2014 PhD Thesis on “Automated Programming using Constrained Inductive Logic Programming”. Another one of the co-authors is UCL professor Mark Harman (now full-time at Facebook) who won awards for search based engineering. Another co-author wrote a paper on grammar recovery; another has given a quite enjoyable TEDx talk on the “wisdom of the cloud”; another previously taught kids to code at TuringLab. All told, I think there’s a reasonably good chance that that the Facebook folks will use their existing momentum to move in the direction of AI for code.

Looking around, I found another recent paper with an overlapping set of authors, “Ownership at Large – Open Problems and Challenges in Ownership Management”, which does seems to move at least a little bit this direction.

If an organisation like Facebook does get behind this idea, they would have the human and computational power to make rapid progress. They have access to the same open data that is available to everyone (though the Ownestry tool in “Ownership at Large” just looks at in-house data).

Let’s be clear that that creating bots that simulate software development isn’t itself a highly defensible proposition. Nevertheless it looks like there is still a limited window of opportunity to be first in. That could have some advantages.

The other point to make is that I also wrote a 2014 PhD thesis, which got at some of the other relevant ideas here from a vastly less technical and much more social perspective. This could also confer some advantages for designing systems with socially desirable properties.