Generative AI is a blessing for coders. One has to give a prompt in natural language, and the model writes the code. In addition, it has the ability to detect the bugs in the written code.
All this raises concerns about coding as a job. Could there be job losses since coders will use AI programming assistants — Co-pilot and Code Assist?
Co-pilot assists coders to write code, suggest code snippets and provides real-time hints. The coding process is thus streamlined. The whole thing facilitates code writing. There is no replacement of code programmers.
There is a limit to what these AI models do — context length. It is a limit to which the model can comprehend the lines of code. As we know, enterprise-level code consists of millions of lines of code. It is necessary to have a human element in the loop while developing code.
AI coding assistants improve productivity of the programmers. It does not mean they do more work. As there are complex issues while programming, we have to increase the number of coders.
In early days, coding was done in low-level language, say assembly language. In the 1960s and 1970s, Fortran was being taught at educational institutes. Coders did not spend all their time in writing low-level code. They can develop a large scale distributed system in Fortran. However, the new developments bring a new set of complexities — public and private cloud, scaling up and down, dependencies while distributing.
AI coding assistants also learn the code from what a human coder writes. It means that human programmers, and domain experts are still needed.
AI coding assistants facilitate automation and testing. They only automate repetitive tasks. AI cannot reach human-levels of problem solving.
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