Will AI impact software engineering?

How far can the AI go?

I’m going to use two people in this post to explain how things with AI might play out.

A User = Average user/consumer/business owner.

A Techie = Someone with a bit of technical background.

Lets talk about User first..

A User will be able to go to an AI-Builder site and ask for something like:

“Create me an E-commerce website to sell products online where I can take payments”.

The AI will be able to create a complete website (happily adding some default functionality too like ability to add logo, change product icons etc..)

AI will also gather user input where possible, for example if the user wants to also show featured products, if they want admin functionality to add discounts or and have ability to create coupons. AI will be able to write code for all this.

And TADAAA…!

Based on this vague information AI will be able to create a completely new website and push it to a server, send user the admin logins and everything they need.

If the user wants to make a change to the site, for example to add a search bar to search products or have a category in the dropdown menu, the user can interact with AI again and it will introduce these new features and auto deploy them.

Trouble for the User

The more complex the task, deeply the User will have to think, there will come a point where the user won’t be able to give AI clear instructions. It will slowly become a full time job if User is constantly improving the site. Remember, more code = more mess. Time to get a Junior AI person?

AI may even break the site, fix other things or keep trying until it comes up with something that the user is happy with.

AI will also introduce logical issues because the User cannot explicitly tell it what they want.

However, for a lot of very small businesses the AI Builder will be able to put together decent sites without much fuss.

The friendliness of AI will give consumers a lot of confidence and a lot of times they will be able to get what they want.

After some progress the quality of AI response will degrade simply because the instructions won’t be as clear. Business owners aren’t that technical to be able to refine their instructions and make them crystal clear for AI.

Plus, the builders won’t be free.

What about a techie now?

The Techie on the other hand can take the instructions from the User and translate them into a step by step plan so AI can work with it.

This plan would be much more detailed.

I expect the Techie to put together a very precise spec document with clear instructions of how they want each aspect of the site to function.

Spec doc

This may include (very short list!):

• Database columns
• Framework to build it in
• Coding standard to follow
• How each functionality will work.
• How each functionality will be connected to other parts of the site.
• What specific API to use
• All logic considerations

They will also need to tell the AI what dependencies to use, if the output looks clean & maintainable, if code looks like a mess, if AI is making assumptions because the Techie missed certain info in the spec doc.

Techie will also have to tell AI about the new requirements or changes to the spec documents, new details will have to explicitly ask AI to ensure that other parts of the website are not affected to avoid introducing new bugs.

More bugs

If the Techie notices new bugs as a side effect of previous change, they will have to once again revise the spec document and instruct AI to fix the bug, if that doesn’t work, Techie will have to be even more specific about what’s wrong.

Back and forth

This back and forth will be super time consuming and apparently require deep knowledge of the code and business.

Techie can ask the AI to fix things or fix them himself. But make no mistake, the more complex the project becomes the more thinking the Techie will have to do.

If the AI cannot fix the issues, the techie will have to get someone who can help him or fix it himself.

Companies hiring Techies will make sure you’re more than Prompt Engineer.

As a Techie builds more and more websites they will learn how to instruct the AI to look out for specific things in every project.

If a techie does not have coding experience, or doesn’t understand the business, or doesn’t bother testing each bit carefully they will create a site full of bugs.

Once again they’ll have to reiterate the code and fix the issues, then possibly instruct AI to write tests that are meaningful, but as the code changes the test will have to change as-well, so that will require manual review, especially when they’re working on critical websites.

There will be parts of the site that WILL require deep thinking and planning. Simply asking AI “do this for me” isn’t going to work.

Ever seen WordPress website break after plugin update? Yup, the plugin update pulled a new piece of code that broke it. AI will do the same, it’s tedious work.

Final thoughts

Okay..

So having written all this I’d like to give Techie more respect and call them a Web Developer/Programmer/Software Engineer.

When I started this post I was wrong to think that a Techie (someone with a bit of technical knowledge) could easily get AI to do all the work. I don’t think it’s going to be as straight forward.

But I do think they can get AI to do a lot of work, but not much without deep understanding of technologies/code they’re working with.

I do think mid size companies creating more than simple E-commerce websites will not be affected by this.

Finally there will be Users who think they know enough to create entire websites, they will definitely make good progress just like they do with Shopify & WordPress sites, beyond that they’ll have to get someone to help them..

But certain kind of websites that follow a particular pattern is going to be easy target for AI Builders but I doubt it will be cheap.

All in all it’s time to embrace AI to speedup software development in general.

We software engineers should definitely be using it to improve our work. I do think we will be fine, as long as we keep evolving with AI and not go with mentality that “AI will do it all”. This will be a step backward.

AI Site Building tools will become more popular and target small business owners and charge them a fortune for even basic improvements.

That’s it!

Let me know what you think.

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