Artificial Intelligence: Will Robots Replace Coding Jobs?

AI will replace coding jobs is a statement that haunts many programmers. Is the doomsday of non-automated programming coming soon?

Since the very beginning, we humans have focused on making our lives easier. The curiosity related to things, what are they, how do they work, what can we do with them has been ever increasing and due to these characteristics, today we are in a position where we think of automating everything.

It all started with machines, first, they started to reduce the time and money required to do a job that required some number of workers. For example, digging land to a few feet below required weeks and it involved 4 or 5 workers. Today, we have excavators that can do the same task in hours.

The advent of computers has kept the trend going and Artificial Intelligence has added the excitement of the new tech revolution. We have come to a point where it is hard to tell whether the customer support executive, we are talking to is a human or a bot. Although chatbots have not replaced customer support executives, chances are high that advanced AI tools will be able to resolve simple to median queries easily.

When computers were first introduced to the common household and businesses, the aim was to make computers do repetitive tasks. Now we are aiming high “make computers do what we humans can do”.  One interesting question that we all are curious to know is, “Are software developers going to be swept away by the AI wave”? Follow along to find out.

AI and Software Development

The short answer to the former question is no. Dooms Day of Automated Technology Creation is not coming anytime soon. Who is going to maintain the AI tools? The software developers of course and to be more precise we call them AI engineers. If a new technology removes one type of job, it creates a new industry and new opportunity.

The same has happened and will happen as AI emerges out of its infant state as the time passes. The point here is not about AI being a replacement tool for software development, it will in fact be a more complementary tool for software development.

Developers will be more effective, and they will be more focused on getting the job done perfectly instead of thinking about miniature issues of syntax and semantics. What more can AI add to this amazing field of software development? Before we answer that question let’s familiarize ourselves with the buzz word “Machine Learning”.

What is Machine Learning?

If Artificial Intelligence is the universal set, then ML is its application or call it subset. Often, Machine Learning is described as giving computers the ability to act without being explicitly programmed. Traditional programming is about telling computers what to do, we provide the conditions and on the basis of some inputs, the output is delivered.

Machine Learning on the other hand creates its own condition on the basis of some input data and eventually “learns” from it. Some applications include speech recognition, Image Recognition, Self Driving Cars, Recommendation Systems, and many more.

Mathematically, machine learning is nothing but a type of AI that makes rules based on some statistical inputs. In other words, if AI takes some data and based on some rules of classification predicts or classifies the output then machine learning is an approach to finding those rules.

For example, if you were to create a system that detects whether an image includes a cat or not then an AI is something that uses the ML rules to make predictions whereas Machine Learning which is an application of AI constantly learns from data i.e. creates and improves the image detection model.

So, what does ML applied to programming languages enable to us?

We can imagine AI can help IDEs be more intelligent in providing code suggestions. For now, it is difficult but not impossible to create a system that can code flawlessly as we describe the requirements and get the application ready in no time. However, what is possible for now is to have a system that can help coding easily for developers in the following areas:

Categorising Code

As developers code along AI plugins in their development environment could effortlessly categorize the modules based on quality i.e. whether the code is perfectly designed or not and that includes suggesting some design patterns, edge cases, context, dependencies, readability, etc. The AI plugins could define the purpose of a function to a second developer by describing the context in which it was written.

Automated Translation

AI has the ability to translate human languages, for example, English to Russian and vice versa. Therefore, we can expect to have tools that would be able to translate Java into C or Python depending on the specific requirements. This can lead the way forward for API translation of one programming language into another for faster reusability.

Smart Code Completion

We are familiar with code editors such as Visual Studio Code that provide code suggestions while typing out some code. They only provide suggestions when a developer is typing an object name or a method and what pops up are predefined properties or method names. With the help of AI, we can have plugins that can provide a robust suggestion based on context or even autocomplete the function definition based on previous related modules.

Plugins like Codota are available that leverage the power of AI to autocomplete code for any programming language. Similarly, there are plugins such as deepcode that have AI based code review feature that notifies the developer about critical bugs.

What would be the result of AI-driven programming?

One thing is for sure, an AI-driven programming environment will help developers focus on the fun part. The purpose of such tools would be to formulate the ideas and suggest code that is scalable. The aim is similar to what new languages and frameworks enable i.e. to make development easier by solving existing issues, but AI-driven programming will have different capabilities. The promise seems too much but we will get somewhere.

We have not fully leveraged the AI’s capabilities as our imagination is the only boundary. Also, it is just the beginning of the beginnings. Chatbots and Self Driving Cars are just trailers.

Once we are able to create AI driven programming environments only then we would be able to think of completely automated programming tools, which is a long way to go and in the meantime developers need not worry about robots replacing them because they (the developers) would be the ones coding up the robots and maintaining them. So, the key is to keep upgrading with the new technological trends.

About Author:

Mahipal Nehra, Working with a Java Development Company. Tech enthusiast who loves to read and get acquainted with latest technologies that are going to change our world, including payment systems, AI based commuting services and robots with blazing fast web applications running on low end to high end hardware.

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