Same skills, new tools: why developer fundamentals endure in the AI era
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AI writes code, but human developers still call the shots. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. GenAI is being hailed as a revolutionary coding tool. Yes, it creates enormous opportunities for development teams, but we must remember that AI is a junior developer, not an engineer.
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The idea that AI will take over app development overlooks a core aspect of a developer’s job. There’s a reason we call them developers or engineers and not code typists. Writing commands has never been the hard part. The challenge lies in ensuring the code solves the problem at hand within the product’s constraints and domain. The current generation of GenAI doesn’t accomplish this.
The developer role is not dead — it’s evolving. With AI assisting with code generation, human developers’ creativity, strategic thinking and contextual understanding will be even more crucial in shaping successful software solutions. VP of Engineering at Prismatic.
Developers have long used code templates, generators and auto-complete to expedite programming. GenAI can take these tools one step further by writing entire functions or blocks of code from natural language prompts. However, AI does not fully understand logic and lacks context on business problems and the software’s purpose, resulting in mediocre code.
For example, GenAI can create a code that calculates total sales revenue. However, the output may fail to account for organization-specific variables, such as including returns and rebates in the equation and formatting results to meet reporting requirements. The code technically works, but it does not actually solve the problem.
