AI: The Next Software Developer?

The past few months have seen many groundbreaking innovations in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). One of the more noteworthy events is the release of ChatGPT to the general public.

ChatGPT is a transformer-based language model, a variant of the traditional Language Model, that was first discussed in a 2017 paper. Only 5 years after the paper introduced the concept the product was commercially available. Simply put, this innovative Deep-Learning model is designed to generate human-like text in a conversational style.

So what's the big deal? AI is a revolutionary technology that has the potential to greatly impact many industries, and the speed at which new AI products are being developed and released is rapidly increasing.  If you have not tried out ChatGPT I would strongly recommend giving it a go, especially if you are skeptical as to its abilities.

I will fully admit that I was skeptical as to whether it would be able to produce any results on par with a human, however, I stand corrected.  For example, one of my friends asked ChatGPT to write a story comparing hot dogs to the Cold War, and the connections that it made were truly remarkable.

ChatGPT is not just limited to writing fictional stories comparing Hot Dogs to Geopolitical events, it can also write fully-functional programs in a multitude of programming languages. I first asked it to create a complicated program based on nothing more than a crude problem statement. Nevertheless, it managed to create a program that performed the desired functions, and I was astonished by the results. Moreover, this was not my first experience with AI-assisted development as previously I had used GitHub's Copilot;  both of these technologies gave me the eerie feeling that the traditional job of a human coder was on its way out.

The growing popularity of AI-assisted development is beginning to cause a shift in the role of developers. Instead of writing every line of code, developers may increasingly focus on assembling pieces of machine-generated code into a cohesive program. I predict that in the near future developers will only feed a problem statement to an AI that will generate the required code. The shift will move the role of developer from coder to more of project manager.

Given these potential changes, I would suggest that all current and aspiring developers get comfortable with using and integrating AI into their developmental process, as it may not be an optional feature in only a few years.

- Joseph Welsko