Recently Microsoft has announced substantial layoffs. Microsoft to cut up to 9,000 jobs as it invests in AI - BBC News https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxl0w1w394o Such restructuring of the workforce is taking place when the company is making large investments in generative AI, which can among other things, generate computer source code. Naturally people assume that Microsoft is assigning coding more and more to AI and fewer engineers are needed.
Microsoft claims 30% of new code is written by AI - PCWorld https://www.pcworld.com/article/2768784/microsoft-ceo-claims-30-of-new-code-is-written-by-ai.html Microsoft's CEO reveals that AI writes up to 30% of its code - some projects may have all of its code written by AI - Tom's Hardware https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsofts-ceo-reveals-that-ai-writes-up-to-30-percent-of-its-code-some-projects-may-have-all-of-its-code-written-by-ai But I observe a major contradiction. If Microsoft's engineers find AI code generation efficient and effective, so should those working on free software projects. There should be submissions of AI-generated code, discussions of the quality of such code, user reviews of various AI-powered development tools and suggestions of how AI can enhance traditional development tools, but I see none of it. I arrived to this conclusion after a cursory check of some developers' lists in the following archive: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/ Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. If anybody can point out to good examples of AI usage in free software development, I'd like to know. I believe that if AI is capable of code generation, it should be up to other, related tasks. Code inspection is one of them. In many regards inspecting existing code is easier than creating code from scratch. It is strange that we hear a lot about AI code generation and little about AI code inspection. Akira Urushibata _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
