Main image of article What Makes Developers Anxious About A.I.?

What makes software engineers and other tech professionals nervous about artificial intelligence (A.I.)? According to a new study, it’s not just the fear that A.I. will take their jobs; tech professionals are concerned about everything from the quality of A.I.-generated code to whether they’ll need to learn new skills.

CodeSignal recently surveyed 1,000 developers worldwide about their use of A.I. coding assistant tools; while many of those developers were excited about the potential of A.I. to boost their productivity and code quality, aspects of the technology also sparked concern:

Despite their concerns over the technology, numerous software developers and engineers continue to rely on A.I. tools to get their work done. According to CodeSignal’s report, some 49 percent said they used these tools daily, while another 39 percent used them weekly (10 percent indicated they did so every few weeks). Around 91 percent of developers reported utilizing ChatGPT as their generative A.I. tool of choice, well ahead of GitHub Copilot (33 percent) and Google’s Bard (21 percent).

 

Companies are also interested in tech professionals with generative A.I. skills. Last year, Upwork generated (pun intended!) an analysis of the generative A.I. market, breaking down the top 10 generative A.I.-related job searches from companies (listed here in descending order):

  • ChatGPT
  • BERT
  • Stable Diffusion
  • TensorFlow
  • A.I. Chatbot
  • Generative A.I.
  • Image Processing
  • PyTorch
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Bard

The best way to learn these tools is to play around with them. Google also offers a nifty breakdown of how generative A.I. actually works and what it can do for you:

As you proceed on your generative A.I. journey, always remember that the technology is imperfect; if you use it to generate code, for example, you should make a point of double-checking the output for errors. While generative A.I. tools can speed up your workflows, they can’t do everything; engineering jobs still demand human creativity and problem-solving.