AI Enables Developers to Become More Strategic

The results are in and generative AI is delivering on its much-hyped potential. Most developers believe the technology can help them develop their coding skills and become more productive. It will also help prevent burnout. That should be good news for industry professionals, employers and customers.

But to maximize the opportunity, organizations should consider carefully how best to harness the technology and talent they have. That will require focusing not just on coding volume and velocity but also on freeing up developer time to focus on high-value tasks. It should lead to a broader discussion about whether existing tools and platforms used by organizations are fit for purpose in a modern, AI-centric world.

A Helping Hand

For a time, those who shouted loudest about generative AI spoke of possibilities rather than realities. Now, the data suggests that real gains can be made by handing some software development tasks over to machines. Some developers have become ten times more productive using AI, but it won’t be long until this reaches 100 times more productive. One study suggests that while generative AI can improve overall employee productivity by 66% per week, the coding gains are even more prominent. Programmers who used AI could code 126% more projects per week, it claims.

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That’s why it’s perhaps unsurprising that 92% of U.S.-based developers working in large companies already use an AI coding tool at work or home and 70% say they see significant benefits to using these tools. Among the benefits developers are already seeing in large numbers are upskilling (57%), productivity (53%) and focusing on building rather than repetitive labor (51%). Two-fifths (41%) cite preventing burnout as a key benefit. 

In short, generative AI has an overwhelmingly positive impact on software development by reducing developer workload and stress and helping teams meet an insatiable customer demand for new products, services and features. Some 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized experiences today and an even larger share (76%) are frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

Taking the High Road

Yet rather than being sucked into a new, AI-driven race to the bottom, organizations should use this miraculous technology as an opportunity to liberate developers from repetitive manual labor and transform the role into something far more strategic and creative. Using generative AI is only part of the answer. It will also require organizations to reevaluate the tools and infrastructure they currently use and ask if they help or hinder our developer teams.

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A good place to start would be the content management system (CMS). Although content management has evolved significantly over the past 20 years, the headless CMS approach introduces too many roadblocks to innovation, slowing developer work. It might support a one-to-many model of platform-independent content distribution but it has been slow to adapt to the emergence of composable architectures. Some 88% of businesses say the resulting development work required to build custom middleware and maintain integrations between content sources and devices is an innovation bottleneck.

This is why a many-to-many model is required. Adding content federation capabilities to the headless CMS will empower product teams to compose services up to 10 times quicker than current methods. It’s about meeting consumer expectations for personalized content while freeing up developers from building and maintaining time-consuming custom integrations.

Similarly, modern database technology can help to overcome the disadvantages of legacy. In this case, it enables developers to build applications that scale with demand more seamlessly and operate with lower latency and higher performance. That means less time fixing performance issues and more time building new and exciting features.

Changing the Rules

Ultimately, generative AI is rewriting the art of the possible for developers. For some, that’s reason enough to be skeptical. There has been plenty of chatter about the potential for the technology to render some roles redundant as it matures, in software development and across various other industries. 

While the developer's role will change, artificial intelligence will not make it obsolete. generative AI will take on more of the menial heavy-lifting work, perhaps persuading some developers to morph into solutions architects, where they’ll be able to focus more on the design elements of the role. Others may look to new roles that emerge as technology proliferates, such as AI engineers. That’s already ranked seven on a LinkedIn list of the UK’s top 25 most in-demand roles.

So rather than make the game obsolete, generative AI will change the rules. However, organizations have an unmissable opportunity to advance by getting the technology to do what it does best and looking at other ways to free up developer time. Developers will always sit at the heart of the business. But now they have a tireless assistant alongside to free the shackles and unleash their creativity.