Despite bringing one of the most significant changes to the software industry in years, professionals say that code-writing generative AI tools are not substantially changing the software development lifecycle.
Nearly all developers (92%) have embraced AI code assistants in just a few years since their launch, but these tools haven’t overhauled operations within development teams, according to results from GitHub’s The developer wishlist survey.
The effect of products such as GitHub Copilot have led to greater efficiencies within existing workflows, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), rather than changing them so drastically that entirely new workflows were required.
This has led to a quicker development process, spending less time writing code and freeing up developers’ time to work on devising solutions for more complex issues.
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Developers stated that AI-based code generation tools helped improve the quality of their code, reduce incidents at a production level, and boost their overall code output.
The conclusions of the survey were informed by responses from 500 developers across the US in March 2023.
Approximately one-third of surveyed developers indicated that their managers attribute the volume of code they generated to their employee performance, with the same proportion indicating that they don’t expect this to change with the adoption of AI coding tools.
Despite this, the majority of respondents said that their code quality (40%) and time taken to complete tasks (34%) are the primary metrics used to measure their performance. Both metrics are ones with which AI-based coding tools can help.
Over a third of those surveyed suggested that collaboration and communication should be a metric that employers use.
A majority of respondents (81%) stated that AI coding tools would improve the degree to which they collaborate with their colleagues, and AI tools were identified as useful for collaborative tasks such as code reviews and pair programming.
The prevalence and encouragement of collaborative tests and safety checks enabled by AI could calm fears that tools such as GitHub Copilot can lead to increased code vulnerabilities.
Apple has reportedly banned its employees from using code-generating tools such as GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, or Bard over data usage concerns. But data suggests that these tools continue to be used in workplaces for the majority of the time.
Only 6% of developers exclusively use AI tools exclusively outside of work, and researchers stated that the number of employees who do not use AI at some point in their working week will continue to dwindle as time goes on.
A less-visible way in which developers indicated that AI tools improved their time spent working was by reducing burnout. 41% of those surveyed said that AI coding tools can help prevent burnout from taking place.
This followed a previous survey run by GitHub in 2022, in which 87% of surveyed developers stated that the AI code generation tool GitHub Copilot helped them to conserve focus and avoid mental strain.
