Is AI going to replace Developers?
I've been using AI heavily for well over a year. I've been developing in my free time for over 5 years so I'm no expert in either, but I can tell you, in the current state, AI is not replacing developers, here's why.
The problem
If you go look at my tic-tac-toe game development, you'll see the problem. In short, AI has some really great strengths, and I use it heavily when I'm coding, but it isn't replacing coders anytime soon.
AI isn't good at complex issues that haven't been "solved' in a public blog or something. In short, AI currently just grabs publicly available information and reorganizes it to "solve" your problem. But when issues get too complex, or too far off the beaten path, AI falls apart.
AI, huh, yeah. What is it good for?
Simple issues / brain failed
I use it when I forget what function I should use or how to do something. For example, if I have an array like [1, 5, 19] and I need to add all the numbers up. I constantly forget the best way to do that. My head always goes to something like:
let sum = 0
array.forEach(num => sum = sum + num)
which technically works but isn't the cleanest code ever. So I'll pop over to Microsoft Copilot and simply ask If I have an array of numbers. How do I add the numbers up in JavaScript?
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
I love using AI to help me identify what could fail in my code. let's take the same example above and say I need to find failures in my array summing code. I could ask AI:
I've created the following function. What could fail in the function that I haven't thought of? The array of numbers is user generated content so keep that in mind.
const sum = (arr) => {
const sum = arr.reduce((accumulator, currentValue) => accumulator + currentValue, 0)
return sum
}
and it said I should filter out any non-numbers in the array which is a great point.
Tests, tests, and more tests
Writing tests suck. It's boring, and trying to get "code coverage" is a pain in the read-end. This is where AI really shines. Something like Can you write tests in Jest for 100% code coverage? it's fabulous.
Breaking down complex problems
Another thought I had was what if I created empty functions and asked AI to "fill in the blanks". I'm going to try that next so stay tuned. I'll probably add rock, paper, scissors to my game website next so I might try and create empty functions and ask AI to fill them in for me.