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AI Will Disrupt How Developers Build Applications and the Nature of the Applications they Build (zdnet.com)
AI will soon help programmers improve development, says Diego Lo Giudice, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, in an article published on ZDNet today. He isn't saying that programmers will be out of jobs soon and AIs will take over. But he is making a compelling argument for how AI has already begun disrupting how developers build applications. An excerpt from the article: We can see early signs of this: Microsoft's Intellisense is integrated into Visual Studio and other IDEs to improve the developer experience. HPE is working on some interesting tech previews that leverage AI and machine learning to enable systems to predict key actions for participants in the application development and testing life cycle, such as managing/refining test coverage, the propensity of a code change to disrupt/break a build, or the optimal order of user story engagement. But AI will do much more for us in the future. How fast this happens depends on the investments and focus on solving some of the harder problems, such as "unsupervised deep learning," that firms like Google, FaceBook, Baidu and others are working on, with NLP linguists that are too researching on how to improve language comprehension by computers leveraging ML and neural networks. But in the short term, AI will most likely help you be more productive and creative as a developer, tester, or dev team rather than making you redundant.
"But in the short term, AI will most likely help you be more productive and creative as a developer, tester, or dev team rather than making you redundant."
So, in the short term it'll make some of you redundant, with the 'more productive and creative' picking up their workload until the bots can finish the job. Sounds good.
All I need is an updated Clippy telling me what to code next!
AI will change "the Nature of the Applications that developers Build?" Sure the first step will be to replace coding teams with a developer who uses AI to generate the code. (cutting jobs) But the next step is to replace the manager plus developer with a single AI manager who tells the AI what code needs to be built. (cutting jobs) And then the AI will be deciding for itself what kind of code it wants to build. (eliminating the need for any people at all)
Am I the only one who reads these as Al, as in short for Albert? It makes these sorts of headlines very amusing.
"NLP" in this context is Natural Language Processing. Not to be confused with "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" which is discredited quack self-help junk. For a moment there, I was very confused as to how those guys would be involved.
AI will disrupt how developers build applications
Oh, good. As someone who has to build applications for users on HPC systems, first I had make. It was simple, things were either in Makefile or not. Drop the compiler options and paths right in. Then I had autotools, where I could pass paths and switches to possibly undocumented options. Still manageable, eventually. Thanks heavens that mechanism to manage an architecture and OS zoo came out as the world consolidated to x86-64 and Linux. Then I had cmake, which I can get to work sometimes. Not to mention all the one-off solutions from individual development groups that just had to improve on the state-of-the-art, because.
Now we'll get to troubleshoot "X not found" from a black-box build system generated by a neural net? Good luck. Nothing leads to "higher quality code" like unmanageable complexity. I kind of look forward to going back to the good old days of one codebase building on the development machine only. I can just about hear the world's productivity dropping from this trendy BS.
The *actual* AI equivalent would be working call-by-meaning.
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It sounds like they're just using "machine learning" to improve intellisense type stuff.
I have a feeling any programs fully generated by AI are going to end up like WYSIWYG html editors until we get to the point of some sort of super AI.
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We should hope that AI can learn to code and do it well enough that I could converse with it in a human language, define the problem as I see it and it would immediately (it would be immediate, right) give me a number of ready solutions to pick from. The amount of new product development that could take place would be staggering, we could quickly realise any idea, I hope that the AI would be good enough at that point to do user support and maintenance for the selected solution.
You, guys, are basically looking at it all wrong. Why shouldn't we desire to have systems at our disposal that would be good enough to create software (and at some point hardware) that we could 'program' by explaining high level requirements to a machine? The machine would have to ask more questions, the testing would reveal problems, the machine could do support and maintenance. I see this as a huge net positive, not as something that would hurt us but as something that would save us from decades of sitting on ass, getting less and less active over time, going blind from the screen... And we could never achieve everything we needed anyway at the speed of a human coder.
You can't handle the truth.
Is about all this article says. They claim it will change the way we program, but gives exactly zero examples of how the author expects it to do so. The only example it gives is Intellisense, which we've all been using for half a decade now or longer and isn't even AI-based. Its certainly made us more productive, but it doesn't lend much credence to the point of TFA.
There's definitely plenty of room to make programming easier.. for example, graphical languages would be a great leap forward if someone could ever figure out a way to allow them to do more than the simplest/most useless tasks while still keeping them easy to use.
I have my doubts as to whether that's even possible but there's plenty of people smarter than me out there and perhaps one of them will show me up, and maybe some form of AI will be part of that solution.
That aside, I find it funny that people assume AI will solve all our woes (and or take over the world, either way.) Trouble is Alan Turing. He's explicitly told us that some problems flat out aren't computable. Which means heuristics have to be involved. And as soon as heuristics get involved, we'll discover buggy software. I mean the AI may well still produce it much faster and less buggy than a human, but its not a silver bullet either.
Sorry Pamela. Every time WIlbur and Orville right made a test flight that didn't sustain self-powered flight, the world was totally justified in saying "Nope, sorry, that's not flying". And to say AI is "getting closer" is totally bogus. We have no idea that AI research is even going in the right direction, let alone getting closer to synthetic thinking. At least Wilbur and Orville were actually making progress.