The cloud giant says that that occupies the remaining seven hours is spent knee-deep in the “tedious, undifferentiated tasks” of modern software development: deciphering arcane codebases, writing never-read documentation, testing code for bugs, managing deployments, and playing digital whack-a-mole with vulnerabilities.
It did not mention that developers were often forced to spend their time in meetings where a manager bores them with the latest jargon about moved cheese, kicking the ball running, and how to hunt a paradigm to its lair.
Amazon claims that AI is the solution and has rolled out new capabilities for Amazon Q Developer, its AI-powered assistant tool, which was unveiled with much fanfare at the re:Invent event . This marvel of machine learning promises to help developers build, test, deploy, and maintain software, theoretically giving them more time to do what they do best: code.
Amazon Q Developer Jessica Feng said: “We know the traditional software development lifecycle can be improved.”
Feng admitted that debugging and repetitive tasks “hamper productivity,” which might explain why developers spend more time-fighting fires than creating the next killer app.
Amazon Q Developer offers two tiers of service: a free version and a paid tier at $19 per month per user. Both promise faster coding and handy features like license tracking, but naturally, the paid version unlocks all the bells and whistles. Because if there’s one thing developers love, it’s yet another subscription.
Of course, Amazon isn’t the only tech giant using AI to combat slow and miserable coding processes. Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai boasted that AI already generates more than a quarter of Google’s new code. Pichai says this boosts productivity, which is a polite way of saying, “Our engineers are now code reviewers for robots.”
Coursera and AWS Vice President Swami Sivasubramanian have sought to calm the nerves of jittery developers. Sivasubramanian insists AI isn’t about replacing jobs but eliminating dull tasks. “AI is coming to take away tasks,” he wrote optimistically, suggesting developers will be freed to focus on “interesting activities that generate higher value.”
