AI-powered Software Engineering - by Shrivu Shankar
When it comes to AI-based tools and agents for software engineering, there exists both an unfortunate amount of pessimism and a nauseating amount of hype as to what AI can and cannot do. As both an engineer who uses these tools on a daily basis and who has been building on GenAI since GPT2, I wanted to write up an opinionated perspective in the defense of using more AI for engineering.
Over the last few months, while many engineers have dramatically ramped up their usage of AI-based developer tools, it’s understandable why many software engineers (SWEs) are still pessimistic. They might dislike the idea because:
Large Language Models (LLMs) for code constantly and consistently hallucinate, adding slop code to clean up and creating frustration (not only for them but for their peers and code reviewers)
Writing code is only a small part of the SWE role (at least for higher SWE levels) so these coding tools don’t actually help the “important” things
