Can AI take the work of developers busy creating AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is not yet settled. The announcement this week that Google is offering a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means competitive pressures among big tech companies to create the best service to help coders write more code, faster, continue to intensify.
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service, which has similar outlines, is regularly working on its adoption by businesses. The two companies ultimately want to create developer support technology that can understand a company’s code base, allowing it to offer more personalized suggestions and advice.
Startups are also in the fight, although they tend to focus on more personalized solutions than the broader offerings of larger tech companies; Pythagora, Tusk, and Ellipsis from the most recent Y Combinator batch work on building applications from user prompts, AI agents to squash bugs, and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.
Everywhere you look, developers are creating tools and services to help their own professional cohort.
Developers learning to code today will not experience a world in which they do not benefit from AI-based coding assistance. Call it the era of graphing calculators for software builders. But the risk – or worry, I suppose – is that over time, AI tools that ingest mountains of code to become smarter and help humans do more, will eventually be able to do enough so that fewer humans are needed to do the work. write code for the companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will; no job is secure, some roles are just harder to replace at any given time.
Fortunately, given the complexity of modern software services, ubiquitous tech debt, and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are building today appears to be a very useful and not something ready to replace or even reduce the complexity of modern software services. number of humans who build them. For the moment. I wouldn’t take the other end of this bet over a period of decades.
techcrunch
