By Jason English
AI (as in Artificial Intelligence, not ‘augmented’ or ‘automated’ intelligence) has rapidly become a transformational factor for dozens of markets, including software development itself.
Even if we were aware that generative AIs like ChatGPT can ultimately generate bullshit, as my colleague Jason Bloomberg says, and we know they are getting overhyped across social networks and overvalued by vulture capitalists, nobody could have predicted the excitement the public and press would feel once they glimpsed the future.
We’re seeing AI work its way into everything—almost every platform or software product has put some form of generative AI magic into the mix. No vendor wants to be late to the party.
Governing AI in development
IT executives are wrestling with how to safely govern the use of AI in their development groups. Maybe they don’t realize it’s technically already being used by most developers in their IDEs, for starters, in the form of autocomplete and code co-piloting.
Then further, we are seeing natural language chatbots being used as ‘no-code wizards’ that can automatically generate the ‘best usual’ code for many component aspects of an application and its infrastructure-as-code specifications from a starting prompt.
After all, no developer is interested in coding their own permissions or horizontal autoscaling, if there’s already something ready to go – they would much rather focus on the differentiated application functionality they are incentivized to build.
Even Stack Overflow is incorporating a ChatGPT natural language prompt feature for generating code based on code that was contributed by other developers. What could go wrong with this recursive loop?
If there are bugs, or security flaws in the generated code, we’d expect human developers to thoroughly check for them. But we all know that’s easier said than done when teams just want to move faster.
