If we were to make an analogy from today’s reality, software developers could be considered like the workers who handled the looms during the Industrial Revolution. They are considered key pieces in the world of technology, although their work reality is far from idyllic.
According to a published report by Amazon Web Services (AWS), its developers actually They barely spend an hour a day to what their job is supposed to be: programming. However, that does not mean that the remaining seven hours of your day are hand over hand. The rest of the time is consumed in repetitive activities considered more “management” than programming itself.
“Learning code bases, writing and reviewing documentation, performing tests, managing deployments, or fixing vulnerabilities are tasks that dominate a developer’s day,” AWS explained in its post. These activities, although essential, often slow down creativity and productivity. Something that does not seem to be to AWS’s liking.
An intern for programmers: AI
In this context, artificial intelligence Amazon Q Developer will help the company’s programmers to get rid of that part. “administrative” and focus on the task for which they have been hired.
The company has improved the capabilities of these AIs and, according to Jessica Feng, senior project manager, in the re:Invent event from AWS, “will give developers more time to enable creativity and innovation.”
“We know that the traditional software development lifecycle can be improved,” Feng said. “Currently, it requires developers to write code and spend a lot of time debugging it. The process often hinders productivity and people get bogged down with repetitive tasks.”
The big tech companies are clear about it
Amazon isn’t the only one who believes time is being wasted (and salaries that they pay their developers) dedicating them to tasks other than programming. Google has also integrated artificial intelligence into their development processes.
During the third quarter 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, revealed that more than 25% of new Google code It is generated by AI systems.
“More than a quarter of all new Google code is generated by AI, and then reviewed and accepted by engineers. That helps our engineers do more and move faster,” said Pichai, underscoring the positive impact of the AI in your productivity.
Although tools like Amazon Q Developer are making the work of programmers easier, they also raise questions about the future of employment in this sector. Some doubts do not dispel statements such as those of Jensen Huang or the AWS CEO himselfensuring that in the near future it would not be necessary to learn to program.
Precisely, one of the biggest fears of developers is the impact that AI will have on their jobs. The report’Jobs of Tomorrow: Great Language Models and Jobs’ prepared by World Economic Forum in collaboration with the consulting firm Accenture, reveals that the new technologies sector will be one of the most affected due to the automation provided by AI.
The CEO of AWS has a more optimistic perspective about this impact and, although it recognized that, indeed, there was going to be a change in the roles of developers, this change would be aimed at improving services, not deploying them.
“It means that each of us has to be more in tune with what our customers need and what we really want to build, because that’s what our work will increasingly be about, instead of sitting down and writing code,” predicted Mark Garman.
Image | Unsplash (AltumCode), AWS