Is it possible that AI will take away the jobs of developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the long answer is still undecided. This week's news that Google has created a new AI-powered coding tool for developers comes as big tech companies build the best service to help programmers write more code, faster. This means that competitive pressures continue to intensify.
Microsoft's GitHub Copilot service, which has a similar outline, is also steadily moving towards enterprise adoption. Ultimately, the companies hope to build developer assistance technology that can understand a company's codebase and provide more customized suggestions and tips.
Startups are joining the fight as well, but they tend to focus on more customized solutions rather than the broad offerings offered by the biggest tech companies. His Pythagora, Tusk, and Ellipsis from the latest Y Combinator batch work on building apps from user prompts, AI agents for bug-squashing, and converting GitHub comments into code, respectively.
Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their professional communities.
Developers learning to code today will never know a world without the help of AI-powered coding. For software builders, it's the era of graphic calculators. But the risk, or rather the worry, is that AI tools that incorporate tons of code to make humans smarter so they can do more things will eventually become good enough to do the work that humans need to do. This means that the number will decrease. Writing code for companies themselves. And it will, if companies can cut spending and hire fewer people. No job is safe. Some roles are always difficult to replace.
Thankfully, given the complexity of modern software services, the ever-present amount of technical debt, and the endless number of edge cases, what big tech companies and startups are busy building today is extremely useful coding help. However, it does not seem to be something that can replace or reduce it. The number of people who created it. At this point. I'm not going to bet on a multi-decade period.