As many people have in the last few months, we’ve caught the AI bug around here lately. We’ve been playing with Chat GPT for all kinds of things: writing letters and songs, telling jokes, even writing code. At first, our devs were a bit taken aback, testing the code produced and seeing that it actually worked, there was a bit of ‘uh oh, am I out of a job?’ going on. But we’ve been here before, we know how fast technology and innovation moves. Each new advancement is an opportunity to incorporate a new process into your work and life to make things easier and more efficient, giving you time to focus on the bits you enjoy most.

Have you ever heard the saying, "Work smarter, not harder"? That's exactly what artificial intelligence (AI) is all about in the world of software development.

Sure, you might be thinking, "But isn't AI going to take all of our jobs?" Well, the short answer is no. While it's true that AI has the ability to automate certain tasks, it's also going to make our jobs as software developers better.

Think about it this way: AI is like having a super smart assistant that can handle all of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks for you. This frees up your time and energy to focus on the more creative and complex aspects of your job. And as a result, you'll be able to produce higher quality software, faster.

How we might use AI

Imagine you're working on a project and you need to test a large number of possible solutions to a problem. With AI, you can train a model to analyse all of the data and find the best solution for you. This not only saves you a lot of time, but it also ensures that the solution is more accurate, because AI is able to find patterns in the data that humans might miss. This is in line with the research done by Gartner, which stated that "by 2022, 30% of all software development tasks will be automated." (Source: Gartner.com)

Another way we might use AI to make software development better is to help us identify bugs and errors in our code. AI-powered debugging tools can help reduce the time it might take to  identify the root cause of a problem and fix it. This means less time spent trying to figure out what went wrong and more time spent actually writing original code. (Source: Accenture.com)

As much as we all love a good bit of problem solving, you can imagine how frustrating it can be trawling through hundreds of lines of code just to find out why a button is glitching. Sending a robotic minion in there to do that for you sounds like a pretty great time and mind saver.

But will our jobs be taken by robots?

On the thought of AI replacing real-people-jobs, forecasts actually say that AI is expected to create new software job opportunities. While yes, the data shows that jobs are being lost to automation and AI - a staggering 75 million of them; the number of jobs created as a direct result of the same tech is far higher. It is predicted that around 133 million new jobs will be created, rounding the number of new jobs out to around 58 million new positions. (Source: World Economic Forum) 

AI-related jobs such as data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI researchers are increasingly in demand, as more and more organisations look to incorporate these technologies into their business operations.

While it’s still a bit scary - because change can be scary - and the bread and butter jobs we have now are somewhat at risk, it should be exciting too - it’s the boring bits that are getting taken over by robots. Your job is only going to get more interesting! We’re also excited to see the evolution of trades and industry as they step into this space and what our kids and future generations will be choosing and viewing as lucrative or interesting work.

So! We’re not scared that our jobs are going to be taken by robots, instead we’re excited to see how our jobs will evolve. We’re also excited to see how it can improve our software. When we’re given more time to develop a product there’s no doubt that it will only add more benefit. AI is not a threat to software development jobs, it's a tool that will make our jobs better and more efficient. It will help us produce higher quality software, faster, and with less effort. So, welcome our new AI assistant, it's here to help us work smarter, not harder.