AI AND THE FUTURE OF PROGRAMMING

AIis here to stay. Increasingly capable of generating creative material such as music, art, and writing, AI could be used to disrupt the convention that coding is only performed by humans. In December, AI software system AlphaCode was entered into online coding competitions, and in contests with at least 5,000 participants,

1. CODE COMPLETION

AI can be used to predict the next piece of code that a developer is likely to write, based on the context and the task at hand. This can save time and reduce the likelihood of errors. AI could also be used to analyse code and suggest changes that would make it more readable, maintainable, or efficient, such as renaming variables or extracting functions.

outperformed 45.7% of programmers. Generating code in Python or C++, while filtering out any bad coding, DeepMind says AlphaCode can write computer programs at a level consistent with an average human programmer with about a year of training.

Below, we look at how AI could change how coding works forever.

2. DEBUGGING

AI can be used to automatically identify and fix bugs in code. For example, an AI system might be trained to recognise common programming errors and suggest a fix. Based on analysis, an AI system could also suggest possible fixes for identified errors, such as changing a line of code or adding a missing function call.