Can AI eat the jobs of developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the bigger answer has yet to be settled. The news this week that Google is releasing a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means the competitive pressure between big tech companies to create the best service to help coders write more code continues to intensify.
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service which has similar outlines is steadily working towards enterprise adoption. Both companies ultimately want to create technology that helps developers that can understand a company’s code base, allowing it to offer more tailored suggestions and advice.
Startups are also in the fray, though they tend to focus on more customized solutions than the broader offerings from larger tech companies. Pythagoras, Tusk and Absence from Y Combinator’s latest batch are working on building apps from user prompts, AI agents to eliminate bugs, and turning GitHub comments into code, respectively.
Everywhere you look, developers are creating tools and services to help their own professional team.
Developers learning to code today won’t know a world without AI coding help. Call it the era of the graphing calculator for software developers. But the danger — or worry, I guess — is that over time AI tools that absorb mountains of code to get smarter to help people do more will eventually be able to do enough that they need fewer people to do the job of writing code for the companies themselves. And if a company can spend less money and employ fewer people, it will. no job is safe, but some roles are simply harder to replace at any given time.
Fortunately, given the complexity of modern software services, ever-present tech debt, and an infinite number of edge cases, what big tech and startups are building today seems to be very useful for coding to help rather than something ready to replace or even and reduce the number of people making them. Currently. I wouldn’t take the other end of that bet on a multi-decade time frame.
