LLMs and AI make software development harder
LLMs and AI make software development harder. Wait, what? Isn’t the whole point of AI to make writing code easier? Well, yes. But writing code is the easy part of software development. The hard part is understanding the problem, designing business logic and debugging tough bugs. And that’s where AI code assistants like copilot or chatgpt make our job harder, as they strip a way the easy parts of our job and only leave us with the hard parts and make it harder for new developers to master the craft of software development.
Coding is the easy part?
Is coding really that easy? No, not exactly easy - mastering a programming language still takes years of practice. But when looking at software development as a whole, writing code is one of the easier part and it is no wonder that chatgpt and copilot can write decent code. First, they have trained on millions of lines of code and second, code is by its nature very easy to understand for a machine as programming languages are very structured languages with limited vocabularies. For a LLM it is probably much easier to learn than natural language.
Programming languages are just very powerful tools that we use to solve problems
In the end, programming languages are just very powerful tools that we use to solve problems. And the hard part is not the learning tool, but understanding the problem and designing a solution for it. This is instantly obvious as most software engineering problems could be solved by a lot of different programming languages, which one to pick is a matter of context or even personal preference.
Another indicator that programming is that easy part is, that the more senior a software developer gets, the less time they usually spend writing code. Instead seniors spend more time understanding the problem, designing the solution, jumping in to debug tough bugs or doing design decisions and of course mentoring junior team members. While this might not be true for every senior developer, when looking at my software development bubble this is a clear trend.
The hard parts of software development
Copilot and other AI assistants are a great help for developers, but they are not flawless. A part of it is natural, as they are trained on existing code without any context and there are also some bad habits from the training data that code assistants might have picked up. And while this might get optimized over time, at the moment it means that developers still have to review the code that is generated by the AI code assistants. And reviews are hard - especially if one cannot query the author of the code for their intent.
And even if the code is good enough, it might still introduce flaws into the control logic of a program, might be missing edge cases or introduce a regression bug when integrated into an existing code base. This means that developers have to debug the code that is generated by the AI code assistants in case of an error. And debugging is hard - especially for these kind of problems where it might be hard to recreate the circumstances that cause the bug in the first place.
As the generated code heavily depends on the context we give the AI code assistants, this means that we have to be very precise in our descriptions which means that we have to understand the problem very well, which requires domain knowledge and context awareness on the side of the developer. Even if we just focus on the technical part, being aware of the surrounding architecture and the existing code is crucial to get good results.
Granted we could ask LLMs like chatgpt for help with integration into the codebase or we could just pass it the whole codebase and let it redesign everything. But apart from requiring lot of input to give enough context debugging in an unfamiliar codebase is even tougher than debugging stuff that you wrote yourself.
And then there is the whole thing about figuring out what exactly our product should do, how it should behave and how it should look like. At the moment this still requires a lot of human smarts and while AI tools might allow us to iterate faster on figuring out what we want to build in the end it is still a human that has to make the decision.
AI generated software development is exhausting
It seems a given that AI assistants will change our job by automating away writing code and even helping us with some design decisions. It is very convenient that we can ask chatgpt questions regarding system design and get reasonable answers. What is still left to us is making the decision on which answer to pick and which prompt to give to the LLM to get the results that we need. And this is very exhausting - decision fatigue is a thing and it is very real. Already before AI code assistants the limiting factor in the speed of delivering software was not the often the decision making process of an organization or a team - not writing the code.
The limiting factor in delivery speed is decision making, not writing code
On top of that is that current company structures will most likely still hold software developers accountable for the code that is running in a product, not the AI code assistants that wrote them in the first place. This will add another layer of stress on it, not just do we need to make more decisions faster, we are also to blame if the AI code assistants make a mistake.
And if there is a mistake then the debugging needs to be done, which often needs a lot of context and background knowledge to be efficient. AI tools are of less help there, because they cannot figure out context changes by themselves. They might help us with the easy part of debugging like running tests with different variations, to narrow down the cause but finding the prompt for an LLM to generate the fix will still be on us.
Are AI tools replacing developers?
AI assistants might lower the initial hurdle to get into software development, but they will not make it easier to become a good, experienced software developer. Most of the senior developers I know gained the background knowledge and context needed to formulate complex solutions from years of slogging through (bad) code and learning from their mistakes. This might be an inefficient way of learning but it is very effective in building up the domain knowledge that is needed for software development. This knowledge is also something that is very hard to teach in a formal way, as books or online tutorials by nature are somewhat generic and and adaption to real life situations still needs hands-on experience.
As I see it, broad usage of AI tools will change the the skill distribution of software developers. We might end up with a lot more junior developers that are able to write code - or at least prompt the LLMs write the code - but lack the deep understanding of software development to be efficient in decision making. On the other hands senior developers that have acquired the context and domain knowledge will be fewer and fewer as the effort to acquire this knowledge will be higher as AI tools will hide away the parts that would enable us to learn unless the generated code is reviewed in-depth, which then raises the question if we gain that much efficiency through the tools at all.
So are AI tools replacing developers? Currently no, they will transform the job of a developer but they will not replace them. The question is how we as an industry will make sure that we retain the knowledge and experience that we have gained over the years. It will also raise the question how we handle the human side of software development, as the job will either become more boring because we just feed machines with prompts, yet more stressful because we have to make more hard decisions faster. Or maybe AI tools are really just a hype and a fad and nothing will change at all.