Do we really need a developer/coder/programmer role in the era of AI+ML evolution ? I don’t think so. Let’s see few rapidly evolving trends, where we can auto-generate code using AI+ML tools and in near future the need of the developers will be decreased considerably and deprecated eventually.
What it is ?
As the online data and code is growing along with the AI and ML tools maturity, it’s easy to harvest in AI and ML for coding suggestions, auto-complete features and auto-code generation anonymously. These tools are continuously training their ML algorithms from the public code repositories and expanding it’s contexts which makes them better day by day. And believe me it’s so efficient and fast in suggesting alternatives, options and multiple choices of code blocks as we start writing our code.
It will decrease the number of developers we normally required to write total Line of Code we have estimated in the beginning. I’m not surprised if in future there is an AI + ML tool to create entire solution itself without any kind of human involvement.
Why we need developers then ?
As I told you, in future we rarely need developers, but we need code reviewers. Whatever the code generated by the tools, must be reviewed and in a sense fine tuned according to the team requirements, standardards, etc. All the auto-generated code must gone through a human eye before it’s getting released into the production.
In future we only needs people who understands auto-generated code quickly, instead of who writes optimized code quickly. So here the definition of optimized code is subjective, may vary person-to-person and company-to-company.
What should we do then ?
It’s simple, start understanding code written by your peers. Best practice is peer review. I found many people who can write code very efficiently, but if it’s a legacy code or the code written by somebody else then they found it diffficult to understand end-to-end and sometimes taking ages to understand it.
Current Tools for Auto-Code Generation
GitHub CoPilot
This is the trending tool, but still in experiment stage. Demo
Tabnine
The Tabnine is there since a while now, and pretty matured if we use it in a team. Demo