I recently spoke with a young man, straight out of college—an embedded software engineer developing in C and C++. He told me that he was the only recent new-hire on his team at a chip manufacturing company and that most of the developers he worked with were fifty or older. He relayed that his productivity compared to the more senior developers was much higher, even though he had far less experience, and that this was due entirely to his embrace of chatGPT as an assistant in his daily development work.

As a developer who has “leaned in” to the use of AI in my work, I was very surprised by this. I couldn’t imagine that there were software developers that weren’t using AI to boost their productivity and improve the quality of their work. 

There are always people who are resistant to change, but most developers that I know are continuous learners—always learning new languages and technologies to stay current. I look for this when I’m hiring new software engineers.

In fact, as a hiring manager, I’ve had only one “hard” requirement for developers that I hire. I don’t hire developers that “believe in magic”. In practical terms that means that I hire developers that understand how systems work from top to bottom and don’t look at anything as a black-box that they just use without really understanding. 

I use interview questions like “open a browser, type in ‘cnn.com’ and hit enter. Now tell me everything that just happened from the time you hit enter until the page was loaded in the browser.”

Developers who lack curiosity and the drive to understand how things work generally can’t answer that question. Other questions I like are “what’s the difference between a compiled and an interpreted language?” or “how does a compiler work”?

But guess who can answer ALL of my interview questions correctly and in even more detail that I typically get from the very best candidates.

AI, of course. ChatGPT has been trained on every open-source repository available on the Internet as well as all of the developer tools, websites, etc, etc. It can write code in literally every language, knows all the frameworks, and understands best practices.

Not only is AI a great way for developers to boost their productivity, it is also an amazing tool for continuous learning and self-improvement.

And AI doesn’t just allow you to do the same thing in less of time. It enables you to do more, providing a more mature and more capable solution. In far less time that it would have taken to provide the “bronze” solution, AI enables the developer to deliver the “gold” or “platinum” one. Products are developed faster and maturity is achieved sooner than without AI. With AI, two or three iterations take place where there is usually ten to twenty.

And, as I said in my previous post, this is still the infancy of AI as it relates to coding. AI is still best applied at the function or object-levels as opposed to building entire services or systems. But as developers, none of us can afford to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that AI doesn’t exist. 

At Contextual we are integrating AI directly into our AI orchestration platform, allowing a typical web-developer to quickly morph into a highly valuable AI solution engineer. Even more impressive is that Contextual allows non-developers to build complex AI solutions that can go from idea to production in hours instead of weeks or months. 

AI is here to stay, and it may ultimately replace all human developers and (hopefully) rewrite all of our terrible legacy systems, but you still have to “lean in” and embrace AI in your day-to-day work; because if you don’t, the young kid straight out of university will make you obsolete before AI does.