AI programming is implemented within major technology companies In the future, 20% of the code will be written by "AI programmers".
Cover News Reporter Ouyang Hongyu
Increasingly intelligent AI models are replacing "tool people", and the first to bear the brunt of it may be programmer positions.
On April 2, Alibaba Cloud announced that it is fully implementing AI programming internally, using Tongyi Lingcode to assist programmers in writing code, reading code, checking bugs, and optimizing code. Alibaba Cloud also assigned a formal employee ID number to Tongyi Lingcode - AI001. "In the future, 20% of the company's code will be written by Tongyi Lingcode, but programmers are still the core of R&D, and they will have more time to focus on system design and core business development," a source said. ”
In the traditional development model, programmers need to spend a lot of energy every day to write repetitive code, debug and optimize, write code comments and other basic work, which greatly squeezes the time for writing core business code.
In order to balance effect and efficiency, "AI programmers" came into being. According to reports, within Alibaba Cloud, Tongyi Lingcode has played the role of code assistant in various development links. Taking API development and testing as an example, Tongyi Lingcode can shorten the time spent by dozens of minutes of manual writing and testing to seconds, saving programmers more than 70% of their test code workload.
In fact, not only Alibaba Cloud, but also many technology companies have appeared in the list of employees. Not long ago, the startup Cognition launched the world's first AI software engineer, Devin, who is said to have been able to learn unfamiliar technologies and even fix bugs on his own. Earlier, Fu Sheng, chairman and CEO of Cheetah Mobile, announced through his personal social media that a new product called "Orion Star AI Code Generator" will be launched soon.
AI replacing programmers may be an industry trend. Robin Li, the founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, has publicly stated that basically there will be no such profession as a programmer in the future, because as long as you can speak, everyone will have the ability to be a programmer. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang also said that in the future, everyone can become a programmer.
Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of 360 Group, disagrees with the above view. He believes that the programmer craze will not abate in a decade. "The age of AI is more in demand than ever for computer experts and programmers, who are probably the most vocal in all walks of life. ”
It is now a fact that AI as a tool lowers the threshold for programmers. It is understood that due to the great development of AI programming tools, it is breaking the boundaries of programming languages, so that Java programmers can easily complete the code writing of different programming languages such as Python and C. Alibaba Cloud also revealed that in the future, it will also fully configure Tongyi Lingcode plug-ins in internal development tools such as JetBrains IDEs and Visual Studio Code for all employees to use.
However, the creativity and innovative thinking of top programmers cannot be replaced by AI at present. Some experts say that AI still has limitations in dealing with complex situations and multi-dimensional decision-making, such as still facing challenges in understanding and adapting human emotions, intentions, and communication styles.