---
title: 'Software Development and AI: A Musing'
date: '2023-03-15'
tags: ['musings']
draft: false
featuredImage: blog/person-programming-outside.png
summary: >
  There's a murmuring of AI "taking jobs" from software developers, graphic designers, musicians,
  and  the like. Whether it's GPT-3, GPT-4, or the next iteration of machine learning, one thing is
  true: it's evolving.
---

## Fear of Software Evolution

There's a murmuring of AI "taking jobs" from software developers, graphic designers, musicians, and
the like. Whether it's GPT-3, GPT-4, or the next iteration of machine learning, one thing is true:
it's evolving.

This is not bad news. There's much fear associated with these breakthroughts; fear from developers
and designers of all levels. Many are worried that the new technology will replace them or make
their creative problem-solving skills obsolete. New developers may be concerned that their chances
of breaking into tech are shrinking slimmer by the day.

I hope this musing helps allay these concerns.

## Embracing Change

Things are changing. Fast. Within the last decade, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning
(ML) have taken tech by storm. It started small and relatively unpromising. However thanks to
relentless human creativity and drive, it grows exponentially more sophisticated and reliable.

This should be no surprise! People have created incredibly complex and sophisticated technical
advancements for centuries. This is not the first technical revolution, and we can learn from the
past.

<Aside>

### Consider: Algorithms

Consider the state of the current technical interview process. It's not uncommon to have a developer
jump through hoops programming algorithms, demonstrating their in-depth understanding of data
structures, or narrating their live coding solutions to some arbitrary logic problem... all to gain
the trust and acceptance of their interviewers. Why? Most algorithms have been solved; their speed
and efficiency is understood. Why do we constantly need to rewrite them or reiterate our
understanding of them?

So, what if AI coding could handle all the algorithmic solutions? What if it could provide the
correct data structure for the problem at hand? This would mean that software developers would no
longer need to spend hours working on such things. Instead, human developers could spend their time
piecing together the manufactured parts of a larger application, fine-tuning performance, user
experience and developer experience.

Rather than spending hours finding the most performance algorithm to sort a set of data, we could
prompt AI: "write a function to sort a data set where items are provided in this structure:
[structure]. The sorting function should be as fast as possible." ...then we can shift gears to work
on the more complex parts of a project &mdash; the parts that require human intelligence.

</Aside>


There's a murmuring of AI "taking jobs" from software developers, graphic designers, musicians, and  the like. Whether it's GPT-3, GPT-4, or the next iteration of machine learning, one thing is true: it's evolving.


Tag: musings

Software Development and AI: A Musing