First of all, Devin AI. It's been the talk of the software industry in recent weeks.
Devin AI is the world's "first A.I Software Engineer" produced by Cognition AI. It's an automated system that performs like your average web developer - code, trawl the web for solutions, read documentation, test code and produce reports, among a myriad of other tasks. Except that being a machine, it does all these a hundred times faster.
Users feed it prompts in natural language. It then produces codes, tests and documentation, based on those prompts. Sounding good, so far? Astounding, even. Words like "groundbreaking" and "game-changing" have been used. Of course, those same words were used when Bitcoin came on the scene, followed by NFTs, and then the Metaverse. I'm not saying that this development will go the same way, but recent history has made it hard not to be skeptical.
For software developers, Devin AI sounds like a useful tool, or a even a nice virtual member of the team. Something that can take care of the tedious grunt work while you concentrate on better things.
For employers, it looks like huge potential savings in terms of developer wages. Hey, why pay developers if an A.I can take care of the bulk of their work? And if we're being honest, we all know a team member or two who could stand to be replaced by A.I.
Reports tell us that Devin AI has managed to solve a whopping 14% of software problems it was given. This is not sarcasm; I know it doesn't sound terribly impressive especially since we don't know if those problems were FizzBuzz level or banking application level, but bear in mind that it can only get better from there.
The use of natural language to communicate requirements to Devin AI sounds potentially shaky. Seasoned software devs would probably know the correct terms to use in order to get results, but non-technical users are going to have a rough go of it. If even fellow human beings sometimes find it difficult to effectively communicate due to language and cultural barriers (even when they're using the same language and are from the same culture) I can't imagine it being any easier for A.I. Granted, I could simply be suffering from a failure of imagination.
Jensen Huang
At Dubai earlier in February, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made waves with a speech, which seem to have raised some hackles in the software development industry."I'm going to say something and it's going to sound completely opposite of what people feel. You probably recall over the course of the last ten years, fifteen years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program and in fact it's almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle. This is the miracle of Artificial Intelligence. For the very first time we have closed the gap. The technology divide has been completely closed and this the reason why so many people can engage Artificial Intelligence. It is the reason why every single government, every single industrial conference, every single company is talking about Artificial Intelligence today, because for the very first time you can imagine everybody in your company being a technologist..."
I'll begin by saying that he certainly seems to be saying things that investors and shareholders are going to find appealing. As to how feasible it all is, well... at the risk of sounding like one of those developer elitists I hate, I'm tempted to dismiss that speech also because he doesn't seem to have any relevant software development process. Speechmakers waxing lyrical about things they don't know about is an unfortunate habit which isn't all that uncommon. But hey, for all I know, this guy could be a coding genius, so let's not go there.
Let's be honest. Software developers can be a tremendous pain in the ass to put up with. We can be temperamental, egoistical (a prime example being all the whining I hear online about the audacity of trying to automate our jobs), and have this utterly annoying air of superiority due to being the technical person in the room. And in cases of non-tech companies with very traditional wage structures, trying to pay us competitively while not compromising those structures can be an almighty struggle. Not gonna lie - I can absolutely see the appeal.
Being able to write apps without having to deal with software developers or do the work of learning to code? Pretty much the layperson's tech wet dream.
Then again, I would put significantly more stock in that speech if Jensen Huang were to put his money where his mouth was. Why stop at removing software developers? Why not replace his entire development team at Nvidia with Artificial Intelligence, to produce more Artificial Intelligence?
All this seems like marketing speak. Because there's no way Huang could have meant it all in earnest. My best guess is, this speech was meant for stakeholders who don't necessarily know any better. Sure, A.I will generate code for us. That's not new. You know, whenever I want to make an API endpoint call, I use existing software to generate the code for me, in Python or JavaScript or PHP, because I can't be bothered to remember the entire damn sequence in multiple programming languages. Have I lost my job because I don't have to write that code any more? No, it simply means I can work faster and not get bogged down by minutia. Just because something else wrote the code for me doesn't mean I don't have to verify it. And in order to verify it, I need to be able to understand the code.
I've been learning Japanese kanji. Just for fun, you understand. Take the Japanese kanji below. It means "Sunday".
日曜日
The middle character is one of the more complicated ones I learned in the past year. Can I write it? Have I committed it to memory? No, and no. But do I need to? My phone types it out just fine, and I can recognize it right off the bat. Someone who has only studied Chinese characters (like me, two years ago) would read that entire sequence as "day bright day". But someone who hasn't studied Chinese characters or Japanese kanji wouldn't recognize it at all.
There's the analogy. Software devs looking at computer-generated code have a decent chance of understanding it. People who have had a bit of related training might misunderstand the code. If non-tech people look at code, they're likely to see only gibberish.
If A.I is supposed to generate code, and no one has learned how to code, no one can understand what A.I is doing. Still think people should not learn to code?
However, Huang has a real point when he implies that coding as we know it, is about to change forever. That's because with or without A.I, the nature of coding has always evolved. In the 1960s, programmers were using punch cards on mainframes to code. Are we doing that now? Later on, languages like COBOL came into being. How many of us are still using them now? Now we have frameworks and fancy tools to do most of the heavy lifting. We don't even need to indent our own code anymore - we have linters for that.
Get comfortable with change. It's exactly what our industry produces.
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