While it is still considered the early days of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution, we here at the lexicon wanted to take our time coming out with a stance on the technologies and tools that are now ever increasingly driving our development, and soon, our world. In this article we will provide some thoughts, how we are embracing it and what it could mean for the greater developer community. But before you continue, do know that we use AI now in our work, for the good and for the bad.
Even though the category of AI spans back decades and has received little attention until now, with the explosion of ChatGPT and its competitors, we are seeing a revolution in the knowledge worker field we have never seen before. As I am sure you all know by now, the drive to create faster and better models has driven the perceived value of information and knowledge into the ground. The thought of charging for simple development work by a human has gone away given that just about anyone can ask an LLM to do it and get the solution. Why pay someone for that?
This is all true, but there is a subtle catch that businesses are beginning to realize now, knowing the answer to something and how to apply that answer effectively and efficiently are two different things! It is the real difference between knowing the answer to 2 + 2 = 4 and knowing what 2 and 4 really mean in reality. As kids we were shown 2 apples and we equated that 2 to represent a quantity and that we could extrapolate that quantity to 2 of anything. We also learned that 2 apples plus 2 oranges may lead to 4 things, but not 4 apples. We learned context. AI still struggles with this and that is why the magic you see from AI often has its “quarks” that we immediately see as wrong (hallucinations). Simply the LLM has no real world context of many things.
There has been a lot of back and forth about the topic of developers in this new future. There have been many opinions from “this doesn’t mean anything for us” to “OMG! We are all out of a job!”. As with most things in life, we think there is going to be a happy medium ground. Some foremost experts (outside of AI companies trying to push their narrative) are quickly converging on the idea that developers are still going to be there, but as generals commanding a legion of agents… whether those agents are Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) aware or not.
Over the last 18 months or so, we have continued being developers and doing many of the same things we have always done for a range of clients. The only difference is that we are expected to do more with less. Given an AI assistant like Claude Code, we are expected to churn out code that would have taken us a week to do and instead produce it in a few hours. AI has gotten better at this over time for sure, there is no denying that. Some evangelists have gone ahead and claimed coding “solved”, but any developer with significant experience can tell you, AI continues to get things wrong all the time. Even when it does get it right, it still gives sub optimal solutions. Why? Well, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier… context. They can only work with what they are given for context. What rules does it follow? Got a document for that? Why was this code written this way? Do you have a document explaining the reasoning? More context, more context, more context. As humans we take how much context we have for granted. It is even built into our spoken language. How we use a word in the sentence can change the whole context of what is being said.
Our take is this, developers are going to be around for a good long while. As the onslaught of cheap software floods the market, businesses are going to need someone to sift through the sand to find the diamonds and be able to fix what is going wrong. They will need to diagnose the problem, explain it to AI, get back a result and qualify it as being good enough. Developers will be needed to even stop all those failed software incidents popping up in the news lately (probably written by AI). A human will always be needed in the loop as a check on what the AI systems produce. I guess the real question to ask is if you would ever bet your life on an answer given by AI. If the answer is no, you probably will want a trained professional developer to look it over at some point. They know the real context and value of human life.
One last thing we will comment about is what we are seeing happening in the market over the next few months to couple years. Our bets are that we are not going to reach true AGI anytime soon, full stop. We are going to get very capable agents for sure, those agents may be very well tuned to us as individuals, they are going to be very helpful and they may even get their own bodies as robots. We see them still needing context to know that the cat they picked up and brought to us is our neighbors cat and that not all cats are the same or that our prized 1st place trophy for this year’s poker tournament doesn’t belong in the kitchen sink just because it is glass. We will need very good developers to teach them right from wrong, we will need developers to keep pushing their limits, when we do develop a rule based system (The three laws?) to teach them not to kill someone, we will need developers to input the commands and test to see they are followed.
You may be saying “not yet” to a lot of what we have said here, and it maybe true that one day they can know the difference just as well as us and achieve AGI. But if is still accidentally erasing files from people’s computers, are we sure they are going to be the level where we fully trust them? Until that time, developers are still going to be needed to write the code, check the code and write the future. Businesses will depend on us to make sure things are still right in the world! I want to make sure that as we drive into the future, some human has their hand on the steering wheel for those dangerous parts of the journey.
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