From Silicon Valley startups to tech giants, artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the art of computer programming. It offers developers a powerful new toolkit to brainstorm ideas, write and refine code, and fix pesky bugs — all with the help of AI-powered assistants.
As an example, the AI coding movement is getting a boost from GitHub, now owned by Microsoft, which has launched an AI tool to streamline coding, potentially boosting technological innovation. Copilot Workspace provides developers a new environment integrating the platform’s AI assistant. This integration allows developers to use AI for various coding tasks such as brainstorming, planning, building, testing and executing code using natural language.
“Simply put, generative AI can write your code for you,” Bob Rogers, CEO of Oii.ai, a supply-chain AI company, told PYMNTS. “Programming is a language, and generative AI honestly doesn’t mind switching from English to Spanish to Python or JavaScript, and it’s fluent in all of them. In many cases, if you clearly articulate what you want your application to do, GenAI will write code that does it, and that works on the first try.”
AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot Workspace are just one example of how AI is transforming the programming world. Across the industry, developers are turning to AI to streamline their workflows and boost productivity.
For instance, OpenAI’s Codex, an AI system trained on billions of lines of public code, can generate code snippets and even entire functions based on natural language descriptions. This technology powers GitHub Copilot and has created many applications, from simple webpages to complex machine-learning models.
Similarly, Google’s TabNine uses machine learning to provide intelligent code completions, helping developers write code faster and with fewer errors. The tool learns from the developer’s coding style and suggests completions based on the context of the code, making it a powerful ally in the quest for clean, efficient code.
Observers say that as these tools evolve and become more sophisticated, their impact will grow. By automating repetitive tasks, catching errors early, and suggesting optimizations, AI is helping developers work smarter and faster.
This increased efficiency has far-reaching implications for businesses across industries. AI-powered tools enable developers to create software and applications faster and with fewer resources, accelerating companies’ innovation cycles and bringing new products and services to market faster.
“Simple tasks such as building landing pages, basic website design, report generation, etc., can all be done with AI, freeing up time for programmers to focus on less tedious, more complex tasks,” Rogers said.
“It’s important to remember that while generative AI can augment skills and help folks learn to code, it cannot yet directly replace programmers — someone still needs to design the system.”
Using AI, developers can quickly put together prototypes and identify bugs in their code, Narayana Pappu, CEO of Zendata, a San Francisco-based provider of data security and privacy compliance solutions, told PYMNTS. “Having said that, this is fairly new, so it is important to have humans in the loop to verify code generated, and proper testing and controls are needed to ensure security bugs/issues are identified early,” he added.
Rogers said that AI has helped him recently with coding. Recently, he was sitting in a waiting room for two hours with his son, a conservation wildlife biologist.
“He asked me if AI could help him estimate the types and populations of zooplankton in the water samples he collected,” he added. “I suggested we ask GPT Coding Copilot for help setting up one of the latest computer vision libraries to do that. We also asked for help collecting training images from the internet. Voila! We got the working code from the generative AI, put it in a collab, and had a working classification and counting system working in under two hours. It was a revelation for my son and a fun result for me as well.”
Moreover, experts say AI-assisted coding tools could democratize innovation by lowering the barriers to entry for software development, enabling smaller companies and even individual developers to create sophisticated applications that rival those of larger corporations.
AI coding could also impact commerce. Rogers pointed out that one of the biggest challenges in international commerce is processing and tracking customs and shipping documents as products move from place to place.
“These documents are rarely electronic,” he added. “Generative AI in programming will change this in two ways. First, it is now much easier to create customer AI-powered readers and converters for physical documents. Think about snapping a photo of a document with a phone that is automatically converted and logged. Second, better AI-powered infrastructure will drive the adoption of true electronic transfer processes in many markets.”
Tech consultant John Bambenek told PYMNTS that AI programming “will likely lead to a surge similar to outsourcing, where there is a glut of new products and services that are lower quality but cheaper that consumers will have to filter through.”
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