| I see a lot of comments wondering how AI could be useful as a software engineer so I'll give my take on it: I envision it being able to fully replace a junior engineer, and in some use-cases senior engineers as well. In the case of junior engineers: the AI should have access to an internal knowledge base (i.e. Confluence) and the task/ticketing system (Jira), and ideally the internal chat (Slack). I would assign tickets to it, and I'd expect the AI to reply with comments asking for clarification when there is something unclear, or proposing an implementation before starting if it's not a very simple task (this could even be defined in the task, using story points for instance. Once cleared, the AI submits a PR linked to the task - so far just like any engineer in the team would. The PR gets reviewed as usual, with suggestions/requests for changes made by the (human) team, which then get addressed by the AI. With the big difference that all this process may happen in less than 1h from ticket creation to PR review. I wouldn't expect it to be able to implement complex features, onboard new libraries, or rearchitect the system in major ways to accommodate future features - just like I wouldn't expect that from junior team members. It would obviously be amazing if it could incorporate previous PR comments into it's "context" for future work, so it could learn and improve. Separately I mentioned it could also do part of the job of senior team members - in the form of PR reviews. If it has access to every previous PR review and learns from them it might be able to give insightful suggestions, and for very large codebases it could have an advantage over humans as it could find patterns or existing code that may be overlooked (i.e. "It looks like this util function you added is the same as this one that was already there", or "This code looks different to similar areas, but follows a different pattern, you might want to rewrite it this way //..." Is GPT-4 there? Definitely not, perhaps an LLM is not even the way to achieve this, but I absolutely see this becoming an incredible asset to a tech team. |