How Generative AI Is Changing Software Development

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is reshaping the processes and practices around how software is conceived of, created, tested, and maintained. Where the process of creating software has traditionally required significant amounts of manual programming time to write code, it can now start simply from a prompt provided by an end-user. Developers are utilizing GAI tools to build project scaffolding, create boilerplate code, identify possible optimizations, and even produce documentation.

Rather than looking at generative AIs as tools to displace developers, there is a greater focus on how generative AI can help to enhance their production and creativity.

Among the most immediate and noticeable benefits provided by GAI is increased speed. Generative AIs can provide developers with code snippets, design patterns, and debugging tips that would otherwise take developers time and effort (i.e., researching to find) to obtain. As a result, developers experience less friction while developing a product and can spend more time focusing on providing an overall architectural structure for their software, troubleshooting, and designing with the end users' best interests in mind. For a startup or small developer team, GAI's ability to speed up many aspects of product development has the potential to drastically decrease the time from concept of a software application to its deployment into a production environment.

Quality is being improved in many ways as well. GAI may assist developers in identifying edge cases, offering recommendations for best practices, and preventing the introduction of common mistakes or errors into production environments. While still requiring human oversight, developers will continue to learn, through a constant feedback loop via the use of GAI, to write cleaner, more maintainable code. As this occurs, developers establish stronger code repositories and increased confidence in the software applications that they deploy into a production environment.

One of the greatest benefits of generative AI is the ability for anyone to have access to it. By providing developers with an on-demand mentor, generative AI makes common technologies easier to use and ensures equivalent participation in the creation of new technologies among different experience and skill levels.

Developers are not going away; rather they are experiencing a transformation to orchestrators; developers will be responsible for managing how and when they use AI tools, ensuring the validity of the results produced by AI tools, and ultimately influencing the overall design of the systems they develop. Successful teams will view AI as a partner, combining human decision-making abilities and capabilities with the efficiency of machines.

As generative AI matures further, we will see the ongoing acceleration of the development of software, the continuous growth of the number of iterations required to create a new application or system, and the increased opportunity to introduce more innovative and creative solutions. As these teams partner with generative AI, they will have a greater opportunity to innovate, change, and develop and deliver successful, impactful products in an increasing competitive environment.