AI-Powered Coding Tools Are Here to Help—Not Harm

Generative artificial intelligence tools designed to automate the process of writing computer code are unlikely to offset a shortage of software engineers—let alone put them out of a job, enterprise-technology leaders said.

Demand for software engineers, developers and programmers has long outpaced supply. In recent months, generative AI has given chief information officers and other corporate IT managers the ability to automate some tasks in the software-engineering life cycle, said Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer at Infosys, a business consulting, information technology and outsourcing services firm.

But AI tools aren’t yet sophisticated enough to build working business apps, Tarafdar said. While certain tasks may become outdated as AI-powered coding assistants take them over, “skilled coders will be needed to oversee generated code and documentation,” among other roles, he said.

Tarafdar said he is currently training the company’s engineers and developers to use automated coding tools, including Infosys’ internally built AI coding assistant.

Sparked in part by the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, released in November, veteran business software companies, as well as a growing number of tech startups, have been rolling out software applications over the past few months that leverage generative AI technology to write blocks of code from scratch. Trained on massive amounts of data, generative AI tools are designed to produce text, images and code based on users’ natural-language prompts.

Generative AI sales are expected to reach $3.7 billion this year, expanding by an annual growth rate of 58% to an estimated $36 billion by 2028, according to market researcher S&P Global Market Intelligence. Tools designed to generate code are the fastest-growing category, said S&P managing analyst Nick Patience. That growth reflects a dearth of software engineers, which can hinder business growth, Patience said.

Until recently, low- and no-code software development platforms, which are designed to require minimal input to develop apps, were among the few ways employers could bridge that gap, said Jithin Bhasker, a general manager and vice president at a cloud-based enterprise software firm ServiceNow. “Generative AI will empower every employee to build and deploy automation at scale,” he said.

Despite growing interest for the tools among companies across industries, it is still early days for adoption, with many use cases still in pilot. CIOs have voiced concern that tools designed to lower the bar for code creation could lead to increased technical debt and orphan code. Technical debt refers to imperfect technology deployed to meet immediate needs with the knowledge that its imperfections will require redress in the future.

Still, tech companies are moving fast to capture a share of the market. Databricks, a data-storage and management vendor, on Wednesday released a generative AI tool designed to enable employees to use natural-language prompts, rather than code, to mine a company’s data for business insights—handling a task typically left to data scientists and programmers.

But it isn’t meant to replace them outright, said Databricks Chief Executive Ali Ghodsi. By handling code, the tool allows developers to focus on more innovative, proactive projects, while employees outside of tech hubs still have access to business data without the need for special training or coding skills, Ghodsi said.

Similarly, an AI-powered coding assistant launched in March by software firm Sourcegraph is designed to answer users’ technical questions, fix bugs in existing code and generate new code. It is meant to enhance the work of engineers and developers, said CEO Quinn Slack, adding that developers will be freed up to perform higher-level projects, rather than get bogged down by endless lines of basic code.

Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Microsoft-owned coding-collaboration platform GitHub, said that more than 20,000 organisations are currently using GitHub Copilot, a code-generating tool created in partnership with OpenAI and launched last year. In March, GitHub released a ChatGPT-like version of the tool, designed to enable users to interact with the tool through natural-language prompts.

Dohmke said companies are using the new tool for everything from explaining blocks of code to proposing fixes for bugs. “Technology that is not sentient cannot replace human creativity, it can only help deliver it,” Dohmke said. “Right now, AI is really just a probability machine, a co-pilot that is symbiotically dependent on its human pilot to build the world’s software.”

Vlad Magdalin, co-founder and CEO at Webflow, which sells cloud-based software for building and hosting websites, said he has embraced the new automated coding tools. Speaking this week at Collision, a technology conference in Toronto, Magdalin said simplifying the task of writing code saves time and raises expectations of productivity for developers. “It doesn’t mean that a developer is working 30 hours fewer,” he said.

“It’s not a magical tool that removes the need for a human,” Magdalin said.

Australia is in the midst of a ‘baby recession’ with preliminary estimates showing the number of births in 2023 fell by more than four percent to the lowest level since 2006, according to KPMG. The consultancy firm says this reflects the impact of cost-of-living pressures on the feasibility of younger Australians starting a family.

KPMG estimates that 289,100 babies were born in 2023. This compares to 300,684 babies in 2022 and 309,996 in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley said weak economic growth often leads to a reduced number of births. In 2023, ABS data shows gross domestic product (GDP) fell to 1.5 percent. Despite the population growing by 2.5 percent in 2023, GDP on a per capita basis went into negative territory, down one percent over the 12 months.

“Birth rates provide insight into long-term population growth as well as the current confidence of Australian families,” said Mr Rawnsley. “We haven’t seen such a sharp drop in births in Australia since the period of economic stagflation in the 1970s, which coincided with the initial widespread adoption of the contraceptive pill.”

Mr Rawnsley said many Australian couples delayed starting a family while the pandemic played out in 2020. The number of births fell from 305,832 in 2019 to 294,369 in 2020. Then in 2021, strong employment and vast amounts of stimulus money, along with high household savings due to lockdowns, gave couples better financial means to have a baby. This led to a rebound in births.

However, the re-opening of the global economy in 2022 led to soaring inflation. By the start of 2023, the Australian consumer price index (CPI) had risen to its highest level since 1990 at 7.8 percent per annum. By that stage, the Reserve Bank had already commenced an aggressive rate-hiking strategy to fight inflation and had raised the cash rate every month between May and December 2022.

Five more rate hikes during 2023 put further pressure on couples with mortgages and put the brakes on family formation. “This combination of the pandemic and rapid economic changes explains the spike and subsequent sharp decline in birth rates we have observed over the past four years,” Mr Rawnsley said.

The impact of high costs of living on couples’ decision to have a baby is highlighted in births data for the capital cities. KPMG estimates there were 60,860 births in Sydney in 2023, down 8.6 percent from 2019. There were 56,270 births in Melbourne, down 7.3 percent. In Perth, there were 25,020 births, down 6 percent, while in Brisbane there were 30,250 births, down 4.3 percent. Canberra was the only capital city where there was no fall in the number of births in 2023 compared to 2019.

“CPI growth in Canberra has been slightly subdued compared to that in other major cities, and the economic outlook has remained strong,” Mr Rawnsley said. “This means families have not been hurting as much as those in other capital cities, and in turn, we’ve seen a stabilisation of births in the ACT.”

AI-Powered Coding Tools Are Here to Help—Not Harm—Your Job, Insist IT Experts

Even as code development tools get more sophisticated, thanks to generative AI, vendors and other tech pros say nothing replaces the human touch

Continued stagflation and cost of living pressures are causing couples to think twice about starting a family, new data has revealed, with long term impacts expected