My Thoughts on Artificial Intelligence as a Web Developer

Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to transform the way we work; a tool that provides great efficiency benefits whilst being able to off load the mundane and repetitive tasks.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I don’t believe that AI will steal all our jobs, actually I believe it’s going to create an abundance of new interesting and exciting jobs.

Now I may only be 23 years of age, so I can’t fully recall the thoughts and predictions everyone had about the internet revolution, but I do know that the majority of people were dreading what the future was going to entail. “The internet is coming to take our jobs!”, and sure the internet did eradicate jobs in the video rental industry, postal service, and travel agency industry to name a few. But it also paved the way for an influx of new jobs: cloud engineer, web developer, blogger, vlogger, video game streamer, and many more.

I read an interesting perspective someone shared about AI, and to paraphrase it, it went something like - “Software engineers won’t have to tell the computer what to do, they can now ask the computer to do something”. I thought this was a noteworthy perspective and something not too many people think about when questioned about a future with AI.

A lot of these YouTube videos and blog posts that conclude AI to be a complete threat to the job market are in some way just fishing for views and engagement. AI is the hot new thing to speak about, and ironically it’s the reason I have made a post about it myself! Just look at the Google Trends over the past few months for the search term “AI”, and the numbers speak for themselves.

However, don’t let this fool you into thinking you are a completely inadequate being who should probably pack in everything that they have been working towards. Instead, make the most of this new technology to your advantage, and learn how you can leverage it in your job to make things just that little bit easier. For example, I’ve signed up for the GitHub Copilot X waitlist because I know how much time it will save me leveraging AI to read documentation and build out tests for software I am developing.

Artificial intelligence won’t replace your programming job, a programmer who leverages AI will replace you instead.