AI Will Disrupt How Developers Build Applications and the Nature of the Applications they Build (zdnet.com) 107
AI will soon help programmers improve development, says Diego Lo Giudice, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, in an article published on ZDNet today. He isn't saying that programmers will be out of jobs soon and AIs will take over. But he is making a compelling argument for how AI has already begun disrupting how developers build applications. An excerpt from the article: We can see early signs of this: Microsoft's Intellisense is integrated into Visual Studio and other IDEs to improve the developer experience. HPE is working on some interesting tech previews that leverage AI and machine learning to enable systems to predict key actions for participants in the application development and testing life cycle, such as managing/refining test coverage, the propensity of a code change to disrupt/break a build, or the optimal order of user story engagement. But AI will do much more for us in the future. How fast this happens depends on the investments and focus on solving some of the harder problems, such as "unsupervised deep learning," that firms like Google, FaceBook, Baidu and others are working on, with NLP linguists that are too researching on how to improve language comprehension by computers leveraging ML and neural networks. But in the short term, AI will most likely help you be more productive and creative as a developer, tester, or dev team rather than making you redundant.
Good News! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in the short term it'll make some of you redundant, with the 'more productive and creative' picking up their workload until the bots can finish the job. Sounds good.
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You can even go further back, and note that even animals had a job.
Horses used to have a rather common job of pulling carriages, until the internal combustion engine allowed horseless carriages.
Mules and/or oxes used to provide assistance plowing farmland. Now handled by machines
Sometimes, the job performed by the animal isn't obsolete, but simply ran out of fashion. Regardless, technology still had an impact on more than just humans.
Re: Brave New World (Score:1)
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The elevator scene was written in a way that it didn't "require" an elevator operator. After the Epsilon asked "roof?", a voice instructed him to go down to floor 19, which the Epsilon did so manually. This is clearly a means to show Epsilons being given menial work rather than actually being necessary elevator operators (not that it was meant to insult actual elevator operators, as they needed to be trained in safety and proper alignment.)
The first chapter also demonstrated factory-like automation, inclu
Re: Good News! (Score:2)
Re: "What if computers became sentient?" (Score:1)
I think I've seen this plot before (Score:2)
Let's put the computers that run our civilization in charge of programming themselves.
What could possibly go wrong?
Long Way from IntelliSense to AI (Score:5, Funny)
All I need is an updated Clippy telling me what to code next!
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All I need is an updated Clippy telling me what to code next!
It looks like you're trying to write a new OS! The authorities have been alerted, and will be at your location presently!
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Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to write a new OS! Would you like an induced heart attack, or to be buried next to Jimmy Hoffa?"
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Yeah, stopped listening to this guy when he declared Intellisense was AI, presumably because both terms have "Intelligent" in them.
In other news, a smartphone and a smartlog [atlanticforest.com] are the same thing.
Re: Long Way from IntelliSense to AI (Score:2)
I see you are trying to write C++, would you like me to convert it to Python for you?
Who is doing the building? (Score:3)
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Re: Who is doing the building? (Score:2)
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Re: Who is doing the building? (Score:2)
http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
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K. S. Kyosuke, We don't know how humans solve problems
True, it's one of the mysteries of the universe. If only I could sneak into a university and observe math students solving problems, then maybe I could write a program that mimics the process to solve my problem. Alas, this is too a radical an idea for sure. :-p
so how can we know anything about the fidelity of so-called AI?
What the hell is "fidelity of AI"?
For example, how does a human look at a chess board and evaluate positions to determine the next move? Nobody knows. Computers do an exhaustive search of available moves to a certain depth, which humans are incapable of, so that disproves your claim straight off.
That's a non sequitur right there.
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DARPA is working on this in the MUSE [darpa.mil] program. Here is one of the performers: http://pliny.rice.edu/index.ht... [rice.edu].
Much of the code that you need has already been written, and you just have to find it. So, have a system read in github, figure out what each of the pieces of software do, take the best parts and stitch them together into the program that you need. A great deal of 'computer science' has devolved into looking in stack overflow for what you need and copying and pasting into your program. Jus
Autocomplete does most of the building (Score:1)
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AI will change "the Nature of the Applications that developers Build?" Sure the first step will be to replace coding teams with a developer who uses AI to generate the code. (cutting jobs) But the next step is to replace the manager plus developer with a single AI manager who tells the AI what code needs to be built. (cutting jobs) And then the AI will be deciding for itself what kind of code it wants to build. (eliminating the need for any people at all)
People who think progress in programming is automated code generation, don't understand what programming is.
AI replacing programmers (Score:1)
To the extent of being able to make coding easier (making the languages simpler and easier to use and implement by automating things at the base level), but as far as having AI develop code from scratch it would just say "ZUG ZUG" and spit out garbage as far as I am concerned. The whole "singularity" nonsense is a result of the trend of technocrats becoming fundamentalists about their limited philosophy, essentially attempting to build a metaphysical structure from a materialistic understanding of reality
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Re: AI replacing programmers (Score:1)
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Luckily AI doesn't exist (Score:1)
This isn't fucking AI, stop calling every fucking program AI.
Those characters look so alike (Score:3)
Am I the only one who reads these as Al, as in short for Albert? It makes these sorts of headlines very amusing.
What article? (Score:2)
It doesn't look like anything to me.
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The script you are running is a bastardized conglomeration of react and xpath that doesn't even close matching brackets, I am not worried until you start killing flies...
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Because you have to be a bot to read it. Human readers are obsolete, so they don't cater to them anymore.
Next up: QR-Code road signs.
Because this article didn't define it: (Score:3)
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One problem (Score:2)
Intellisense is not AI.
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Those stupid code completion add ons always disrupt my development. Which is why my IDE is a text editor.
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I like a good code completion. IntelliJ used to have one. Then they made it much more aggressive and now it tries to force-insert its suggestions and I have to do extra work to not have it change what I type. And now it does not even recognize the proper classes to autocomplete many times. Text editor is starting to look like a good option. Progress as usual I guess..
No examples [Re:One problem] (Score:2)
It didn't give a single concrete example of AI helping coding in significant ways. The AI of Siri-like assistants had been in labs already in the mid 70's. That's a 3+ decade lead between lab and commercial success. If code-helping AI is coming soon, I would expect drafts of it in labs already.
I can envision AI identifying possible bug candidates by analyzing code (to be verified by humans), but I wouldn't call that revolutionary.
Will solve that build problem no one should have (Score:2)
AI will disrupt how developers build applications
Oh, good. As someone who has to build applications for users on HPC systems, first I had make. It was simple, things were either in Makefile or not. Drop the compiler options and paths right in. Then I had autotools, where I could pass paths and switches to possibly undocumented options. Still manageable, eventually. Thanks heavens that mechanism to manage an architecture and OS zoo came out as the world consolidated to x86-64 and Linux. Then I had cmake, which I can get to work sometimes. Not to mention al
I believed this crap in high school (Score:1)
A lifetime ago I scoured the Internet for everything AI I could find. My goal was to build a computer system to help me write software and single handedly compete with Microsoft.
Many of the papers I found used notations that were and probably still are over my head but the software and concepts ANN/GA/various annealing schemes I could screw with the basic concepts and general sense of what was and was not possible didn't take no PHD or Einstein to figure out. I found out the hard way after about a (school
WYSIWYG (Score:3)
I have a feeling any programs fully generated by AI are going to end up like WYSIWYG html editors until we get to the point of some sort of super AI.
I hope AI can make coding redundant (Score:2)
We should hope that AI can learn to code and do it well enough that I could converse with it in a human language, define the problem as I see it and it would immediately (it would be immediate, right) give me a number of ready solutions to pick from. The amount of new product development that could take place would be staggering, we could quickly realise any idea, I hope that the AI would be good enough at that point to do user support and maintenance for the selected solution.
You, guys, are basically loo
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That would be fine if I could define the parameters around 'how'.
The problem we have today is bloated unsecure code - due in large part to the focus on delivery of features, at the expense of just about everything else (security, integration, clarity, maintainability, performance, etc.)
The reason humans are not percieved as being capable of performing is because we don't give them the appropriate tools and even if they have the right tools we tie their hands with process. This is caused by IT executive
AI is Magic! (Score:3)
Is about all this article says. They claim it will change the way we program, but gives exactly zero examples of how the author expects it to do so. The only example it gives is Intellisense, which we've all been using for half a decade now or longer and isn't even AI-based. Its certainly made us more productive, but it doesn't lend much credence to the point of TFA.
There's definitely plenty of room to make programming easier.. for example, graphical languages would be a great leap forward if someone could ever figure out a way to allow them to do more than the simplest/most useless tasks while still keeping them easy to use.
I have my doubts as to whether that's even possible but there's plenty of people smarter than me out there and perhaps one of them will show me up, and maybe some form of AI will be part of that solution.
That aside, I find it funny that people assume AI will solve all our woes (and or take over the world, either way.) Trouble is Alan Turing. He's explicitly told us that some problems flat out aren't computable. Which means heuristics have to be involved. And as soon as heuristics get involved, we'll discover buggy software. I mean the AI may well still produce it much faster and less buggy than a human, but its not a silver bullet either.
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He says it will disrupt development. He gives Intellisense as an example. Code completion has always disrupted by development.
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The only example it gives is Intellisense, which we've all been using for half a decade now or longer
Closer to two decades. JBuilder had it back in 2000. Really cutting edge stuff.
Trouble is Alan Turing. He's explicitly told us that some problems flat out aren't computable. Which means heuristics have to be involved.
I don't think that's the problem. Heuristics are what deep learning is really good at. But programming takes a complicated mix of logic and intuition that we haven't figured out how to handle yet. If a task is pure logic, expert systems work great. If it's pure heuristics, deep learning works well. But if it involves constant switching back and forth between the two in ways we can't clearly define, that's beyond what curre
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Heuristics are what deep learning is really good at
That's kind of my point -- the more human-like we make our AIs, the more human-like the code they generate is likely to be. Heuristics are, by definition, not correct solutions -- they're "probably close to correct" solutions which is notably what a lot of human-made software tends to be.
constant switching back and forth between the two
That's an interesting thought, though it doesn't specifically go against my argument.
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the more human-like we make our AIs, the more human-like the code they generate is likely to be.
Except that the machines can be better than the humans at finding and applying heuristics. In the last few years we've seen that happen with a lot of hard problems: image recognition, speech transcription, playing Go, etc. These all take the sort of fuzzy, hard to define reasoning that computers used to be much worse than humans at. But now they do them better than us.
Imagine a day (Score:1)
Sop fucking abusing the term AI (Score:2, Insightful)
Code + Data is NOT Artificial Intelligence no matter how many times you call it that.
The joke that passes for A.I., which really should be called Artificial Ignorance, in contradistinction to a.i. (actual intelligence), is nothing more then a glorified dynamic table lookup.
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Biocomputing.
lame (Score:1)
building applications (Score:2)
Click Bait (Score:2)
AI this, AI that.. (Score:1)
So the "AI" will help manage and refine test coverage? I thought test coverage measurement tools already existed for a good while..
Maybe the intellisense stuff can somehow be attributed under the AI umbrella since everyone seems to love to call almost everything slightly resembling NLP as AI. But if it can parse a list of methods in the class you are working on it is not really much of an AI.
Certainly the AI stuff has potential to disrupt development in the sense that it is a vast field and hard to master a
Putting "intelli" in a product's name... (Score:2)
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AI effect [wikipedia.org] much?
Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'." AI researcher Rodney Brooks complains "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"
Re: Putting "intelli" in a product's name... (Score:3)
Re: Putting "intelli" in a product's name... (Score:2)
This is called "The Science Effect."
So what's new? (Score:2)
New development tools have been coming along since the 1950s, and they haven't stopped. I'm using environments far better than when I first wrote BASIC programs on a teletype. Back then, the typical software application would be scientific computation or accounting programs tailored for the existing practices in companies. Now we have someone showing up yelling "AI! AI!" and telling me that I'll get better development tools and that I'll write different stuff. Oh, yay. Never would have guessed.
cat (Score:2)
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
—Betteridge's law of headlines [wikipedia.org]
Indeed, third paragraph in, we're already knee deep into walking back the click bait, and just
We will all become BAs writing COBOL (Score:2)