Is AI changing how JavaScript itself gets designed?
In a Nutshell
AI is already influencing early-stage JavaScript proposals, with discussions now questioning whether features like structural equality are still needed since AI can generate such code. Later-stage proposals remain unaffected as they are effectively finalized. A key gap is the lack of conversation on designing JavaScript to be more AI-friendly.
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JavaScript language has evolved over a really long period of time and proposals can take many years to get through the process. Some of the later stage proposals have been in this process for many years already. The existence of AI and the prevalence of it today isn't really impacting the design because they're effectively finalized.
For some earlier stage proposals, AI is definitely affecting the design or whether proposals are even considered viable.
At a recent meeting this week, a proposal was discussed for helping JavaScript developers define a notion of equality used in structural comparison. There are many things to consider in JavaScript that are not necessarily obvious to the average developer. The goal was to give developers a framework for describing all of those things and whether they take care about them or not.
A major point of consideration during that conversation was whether developers would even need to define that operation themselves, or if AI is going to be able to do a pretty good job at generating it for them and if that's going to even be needed in the future. In that way, AI is already definitely impacting these earlier stage proposals.
One thing missing is that conversations haven't started yet on what would make the language better for AI to produce. This would be a real benefit to start those conversations.
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