Artificial Intelligence
Consulting
Development ServicesDue to automation, AI, and machine learning, manual processes that took plenty of time and effort are non-existent. AI’s neural networks are getting more and more sophisticated, already composing songs, driving cars, playing games, and helping in cancer therapy. And recently, AI-generated an article, writing an essay from scratch, with a purpose to convince us robots come in peace. The whole article is available on The Guardian.
Nevertheless, despite giving us a chance of automation and helping us solve problems, many people are scared that AI will slowly overtake their careers and replace humans entirely. That’s the reason why most professionals look down at integrating AI’s deep learning ability as a part of their work.
Despite writing articles, AI is starting to write lines of code, imposing the question: Will AI replace programmers? Or will human developers still be responsible for writing code in 20 years?
In this article, we’ll go over the above-mentioned questions that most software engineers have when it comes to creating a piece of software or going through the code base with AI assistance.
In What Ways Does AI Help Software Developers?
The first step that precedes the software development cycle is the determination of the features and technical specifications of the product or service which is being created. Just after determining the functions of the product, the project manager can give certain design and development tasks to the developers.
After the process of design and development, there comes the need to reveal bugs and fill the missing gaps. As a final step, several rounds of testing are needed to create software that can be quite a time consuming experience for a human programmer. As a result, this is when AI gets into the picture and helps devs avoid tedious manual work. Here are the sections where AI offers the much-required assistance.
Fix Bugs
Most of the time businesses rush to place their product, website, or app on the market to keep up with the other business in the industry. Nevertheless, as a result, there are many bugs and flaws in the software that appear after the product is already launched. These issues may cost the business their reputation, their time, and money as well.
The most compatible solution to avoid such issues or vulnerabilities in the implementation of AI and machine learning. Just by relying on AI, errors can be found and quickly solved before the actual launch of the product.
Assistance in Writing Programs
Despite helping programmers to fix the already made bugs, AI helps them correct their code while writing. This error-correcting tool is a great representation of how valuable AI for developers is. AI enables programmers to upgrade themselves by indicating the most common errors they are making. This process is saving time and money for businesses! Instead of going through bugs and mistakes after they are done, AI helps prevent them from being done.
This way programmers can do their thing and not obsess over whether they’re making mistakes or not. Because of course, there is AI right a step ahead of them, to fix it.
Estimate the Project Delivery Deadline
Most of the time the software development projects are more complicated than predicted. Therefore, they don’t meet the expectations when it comes to fitting into the appointed budget or getting everything done before the deadline.
However, AI comes to the rescue by using historical data from previous projects to provide better scheduling and funding options. While human developers might oversee some potential challenges including tight scenarios, AI considers them.
How Does AI Generate Code?
AI developers are the ones who are held “responsible” for creating automated systems that can write code. The first one to do it was Andrej Karpathy in 2015, by using recurrent neural networks to generate code. By taking the Linux repository of GitHub, including all the source files and header files, he combined those with a document worth 400 MB C code. He then trained the RNN with this code and left the code running for the night. To get an insight into what exactly was done, the code is available in this GitHub library.
The code generated by AI had functions, declarations, parameters, loops, variables, correct idents, comments as well as neatly opened and closed brackets. However, the code had various flaws, such as syntactic errors, declaring variables that weren’t used, or vice versa - using variables without declaring them. In the end, this type of AI coding is a long way from being perfect and unflawed.
Can an AI system Replace a Human Programmer?
There are and there still will be divided opinions regarding the importance of AI integration. Since many programmers are asking themselves the question and fear being replaced, here is a straightforward answer. No! An AI system can’t replace a human programmer at this point. Even with thorough work, AI will still need time to be perfect and automated.
Soon, there is a possibility AI will be perfected when it comes to writing code, however, humans will still be in a superior position to it. Therefore, developers should view it as their coding partner, they can take advantage of it. Hopefully, those programmers who see AI as a threat or potential enemy are missing the opportunity to improve their work and strive towards success.
So, what do you think, will AI completely replace software developers and programmers?
