Hey, I am Klaus Haeuptle! Welcome to this edition of the Engineering Ecosystem newsletter in which I write about a variety of software engineering and architecture topics like clean code, test automation, decision-making, technical debt, large scale refactoring, culture, sustainability, cost and performance, generative AI and more. In this edition of the newsletter I am touching the complex topic of producitivity improvements of generative AI.
I think it was Grady Booch who said "..., one of the things that tools can do is help bad designers create ghastly designs much more quickly than they ever could in the past."
Having said that, I believe AI will have as large an impact on software development as the internet did in the mid to late 1990's. Before access to the internet was generally available, developers had to rely on manuals, journals, and co-located senior colleagues for help in designing and coding, etc.
Now, no-one thinks twice about searching online for help with a design or coding problem, or an existing library or framework that already does what they need. AI takes this to a whole new level because it can summarise thousands of answers for you and generate designs and code for a problem in a fraction of the time it would take a human developer to do so
... but just as the early internet could give really bad and incomplete information as well as good, and the quality of the information has steadily improved ... so I suspect we will see some very bad results from early adoption of AI in software development but steady improvement in the quality of the results over the next decade.
One thing, I will be interested to see is if AI spawns a new generation of widely-adopted general purpose programming languages that supersede the Java and JavaScript generation of languages born in the early years of the world-wide-web nearly thirty years ago.
I think it was Grady Booch who said "..., one of the things that tools can do is help bad designers create ghastly designs much more quickly than they ever could in the past."
Having said that, I believe AI will have as large an impact on software development as the internet did in the mid to late 1990's. Before access to the internet was generally available, developers had to rely on manuals, journals, and co-located senior colleagues for help in designing and coding, etc.
Now, no-one thinks twice about searching online for help with a design or coding problem, or an existing library or framework that already does what they need. AI takes this to a whole new level because it can summarise thousands of answers for you and generate designs and code for a problem in a fraction of the time it would take a human developer to do so
... but just as the early internet could give really bad and incomplete information as well as good, and the quality of the information has steadily improved ... so I suspect we will see some very bad results from early adoption of AI in software development but steady improvement in the quality of the results over the next decade.
One thing, I will be interested to see is if AI spawns a new generation of widely-adopted general purpose programming languages that supersede the Java and JavaScript generation of languages born in the early years of the world-wide-web nearly thirty years ago.