John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence.
The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes.
To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few keys and the software tool suggests the rest of the line of code. It can also recommend changes, fetch data, identify bugs and run basic tests. Even though the A.I. makes some mistakes, it saves him up to an hour many days.
“I can’t imagine working without it now,” Mr. Giorgi said.
That sentiment is increasingly common among software developers, who are at the forefront of adopting A.I. agents, assistant programs tailored to help employees do their jobs in fields including customer service and manufacturing. The rapid improvement of the technology has been accompanied by dire warnings that A.I. could soon automate away millions of jobs — and software developers have been singled out as prime targets.
But the outlook for software developers is more likely evolution than extinction, according to experienced software engineers, industry analysts and academics. For decades, better tools have automated some coding tasks, but the demand for software and the people who make it has only increased.
A.I., they say, will accelerate that trend and level up the art and craft of software design.
“The skills software developers need will change significantly, but A.I. will not eliminate the need for them,” said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, a technology research firm. “Not anytime soon anyway.”
The outlook for software engineers offers a window into the impact that generative A.I. — the kind behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is likely to have on knowledge workers across the economy, from doctors and lawyers to marketing managers and financial analysts. Predictions about the technology’s consequences vary widely, from wiping out whole swaths of the work force to hyper-charging productivity as an elixir for economic growth.
The disparate views of generative A.I., which can already converse with humanlike fluency and create realistic images and videos, reflect a basic uncertainty: How fast will the technology improve, and how far it can go?
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, stirred alarm among developers last month when he predicted that A.I. technology sometime this year would effectively match the performance of a midlevel software engineer, though he later suggested that it could free up human developers to be more creative.
Most software engineers do far more than churn out code, designing products, choosing programming languages, troubleshooting problems and gathering feedback from users. Still, nearly two-thirds of software developers are already using A.I. coding tools, according to a survey by Evans Data, a research firm.
The A.I. coding helpers, software engineers say, are steadily becoming more capable and reliable. Fueling the progress is a wealth of high-quality data used to train them — online software portfolios, coding question-and-answer websites, and documentation and problem-solving ideas posted by developers. The A.I. software can then generate more accurate results and far fewer wayward “hallucinations,” in which it offers false or nonsensical information, than a chatbot trained on the rambling cacophony of the internet as a whole.
“A.I. will deeply affect the job of software developers, and it will happen faster for their occupation than for others,” said David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Big tech companies and major business software suppliers like IBM and Salesforce have jumped in to offer A.I.-assisted coding programs. Microsoft, which released its GitHub Copilot agent in 2021, is the early commercial leader, analysts say.
Before long, A.I. could write 80 to 90 percent of code created by corporate developers, said Thomas Dohmke, chief executive of GitHub, the Microsoft-owned developer site.
The role of the human developer, he said, becomes to guide and direct the A.I. agents — “the conductor of an A.I.-empowered orchestra.”
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims.)
The opportunity in A.I. coding assistants has spawned several start-ups and attracted a surge of venture funding. Investment in this A.I. niche reached nearly $1.6 billion in 2024, triple the previous year, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.
So far, the A.I. agents appear to improve the daily productivity of developers in actual business settings between 10 percent and 30 percent, according to studies. At KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm, developers using GitHub Copilot are saving 4.5 hours a week on average and report that the quality of their code has improved, based on a survey by the firm.
Swami Chandrasekaran, an A.I. expert and principal at KPMG, said the gains included using the software assistant as a kind of automated instructor to bring new members of a development team up to speed quickly. The A.I. assistant also helped generate the documentation engineers write to explain their code to others, and it automated much of the work of translating old software into modern programming languages.
Some work force experts say A.I. coding assistants could make entry-level software developers more productive more quickly. But it is unclear if that will mean more opportunity in the long run.
Mr. Giorgi, the health care start-up software writer, uses his A.I. assistant for some tasks he might otherwise assign to a human intern, he said. The Toronto-based computer scientist, who holds a Ph.D., said he was not too concerned yet about A.I.’s coming for his job.
“But I would be worried if I were a junior developer entering the field now,” and would be scrambling to learn A.I. coding skills, said Mr. Giorgi, who works for Abridge, a health care start-up based in Pittsburgh.
Recent demand for junior software engineers, defined as those with three years experience or less, has been weak. But it is still early to pin down how much A.I. is contributing to the hiring softness, labor market analysts say.
Some job-training programs are moving quickly to adapt to the A.I. coding era. Per Scholas, a national nonprofit that prepares lower-income workers for careers in technology, overhauled its curriculum last year.
The training program — a mix of online and in-person instruction — now offers an “A.I. fundamentals” course. Then, after the software engineering students learn all the basics of programming, they get hands-on experience using an A.I. assistant to write software applications.
“We’re encouraging them to really embrace it, understand its importance, because A.I. is pretty much necessary to be relevant in the work force of the future,” said Bolaji Saibu, a Per Scholas vice president who oversees course design.
Ismail FoFana is one of those students, now part of a six-month program of coursework at PerScholas followed by a yearlong apprenticeship run by PeopleShores, a job-training organization, in partnership with Accenture, the technology services and consulting firm. Mr. FoFana, a former restaurant manager, said his training so far had made him consider A.I. “definitely more friend than foe.”
He describes his A.I. work companion as part assistant, part teacher. As a beginner, he can ask it coding questions to learn on his own, enabling him to contribute faster to the application development and maintenance teams he works with at Accenture.
In discussing the skills he will need in the future, Mr. FoFana echoes the advice of veteran software engineers and academics. The fundamentals of computer science, they say, will still be crucial. But wizardry in a particular programming language, for example, will matter less.
“Creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, empathy — these are the skill sets people will need to cultivate in the future to be more effective,” Mr. FoFana said. “And, of course, learning how to manage the A.I. tools.”
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