Honestly, the question was never “will AI take over software engineering?” but “when?” Is that a bad thing? The convo is ongoing, with online free-for-alls and in-depth executive discussions at VB Transform and all. But like all tricky-complicated AI topics and to everyone’s great shock, it hasn’t pumped the brakes at all, on the endless development of new AI-powered coding tools.
Once upon a time and back in the olden days (2021), your friendly coding pal who was fun to be with looked like GitHub Copilot or Amazon CodeWhisperer, AI assistants that, depending on the press release, power, enable and/or drive faster, smarter and/or more strategic software development, giving engineers more time to do creative work/the work that matters, which presumably includes things like “going home on time and having meaningful conversations with their families.”
Crowding on to the scene, to the great interest of the larger development community, have come tools like Google’s Gemini Code Assist, Microsoft’s AutoDev (announced back in March) and more, with a little more get-up-and-go than their predecessors. GitHub’s Copilot Enterprise kicked it up a notch, aiming its sights on big corporations with big development teams.
But the coding tools of the brave new future are finally here, and everything is going to be as shiny and technicolor-bright as Star Trek any minute now, universal basic income ahoy. Applied AI lab Cognition calls its recent platform, Devin AI, a “fully autonomous software engineer” (and because everyone wants one of those, it’s also spawned open-source alternatives like the creatively named Devika and OpenDevin). Taking it a step further, CodiumAI’s new platform, Codiumate, wants to be the Devin of the enterprise set, only sexier, and the company is unsurprisingly seeing a ton of interest.
These tools go beyond gently holding a developer’s hand and telling them they’re doing great — they’re kicking developers out of their chairs, eating all their snacks and doing things like building websites from scratch, training and finetuning whole-ass LLMs and more.
Of course the answer to the very hypothetical question, “is it a bad thing if AI takes over everyone’s jobs?” is unfortunately “well, it depends.” Is it a bad thing if artists and creative writers get replaced by AI? Unequivocally yes. Would it be a mistake for organizations try to full-stop replace human roles and responsibilities with generative AI right now? Absolutely. AI continues to need oversight — to ensure quality standards, root out the kind of wild leaps in logic only a dumb machine could make, find any security vulnerabilities and make for certain-for certain that these tools are as robust and reliable as we’d all love them to be, in our collective Star Trekesque fantasy. But AI-driven operations are already here, ushered in by not-actually-fully-autonomous software systems that make everyone have to adopt phrases like “agentic orchestration,” and the future of software engineering is still being written today.
CodiumAI’s CEO, Itamar Friedman, will be at VB Transform 2024 to talk about that future, including the challenges of adapting coding agents for large-scale enterprise use, and pragmatic solutions for successfully and happily and securely adopting the latest and shiniest of the very shiny new coding toys into existing enterprise workflows and industry standards.
He’ll have opinions about solutions like Devin, and Google and Microsoft’s entrants into the field, and even take a look at the decentralized, self-organized future of autonomous AI solutions.
VB Transform 2024 is coming to you live in San Francisco, July 9 – 11, and this year’s theme is all about putting AI to work at scale, complete with practical gen AI case studies and application stories that will inspire change in your own organization, plus networking, gossiping and more with the industry’s top thought leaders. Don’t miss your chance to register now!
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