Team Viewpoint: AI & Development, the top 3 things to watch out for

Becky is our Technical Director and the Queen of Code. So there is no one better to ask than her about the world of AI and development, and her top 3 things to watch out for.

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Becky tells us...

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"As a digital technology, AI is first and foremost a product of us as developers. Not just because it’s built by developers, but because it has a huge host of training material made by us from Stack Overflow to Github.

For me, the top 3 things to watch out for are....

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1. Not all code is good code

Just because AI is made of code, doesn’t mean it’s a development oracle. AI often delivers results that can be inefficient, incorrect, or in some cases completely made up.

This opens the doors to misuse by those who are looking for a programmatic quick win. People running code they don’t understand is dangerous and can lead to data loss, high risk of data breach and failing infrastructure when used without knowledge and care.

Unfortunately, examples of this are already happening 🤦🏻‍♀️

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2. Assist not resist

At the birth of ChatGPT developers were some of the first to be fearful of the implications, possibly because we understand it more, and possibly because we watch too many sci-fi films 😆.  

But for the time being I think the key is focusing on how AI can assist us, instead of replace us. One of the most effective uses of AI for development is in productivity, as demonstrated by the rise of Github Copilot, reducing the time and effort spent on mundane tasks and allowing us to problem solve the complex stuff.

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3. Context is king

Tools like ChatGPT rely on generality, assessing and combining material from disparate data sets across the web to form an answer. In development the rules should be somewhat different.

By training AI around specific contexts such as a defined code base or product scope, the results can be more relevant and aligned to our specific ways of working."

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Well there you have it! Becky's top things to watch out for. Would you agree or do you have other ideas?

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