TechCrunch Minute: Google’s Gemini Code Assist looks to use AI to help developers

Will AI take away the jobs of developers who are busy building AI models? The short answer is no, but the longer answer is undecided. News this week that Google is launching a new AI-powered coding tool for developers means pressure is still heating up among major tech companies to build the best services to help coders go faster write more code.

Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot service has a similar profile and has been steadily working towards enterprise adoption. Both companies hope to eventually build developer assistance technology that understands the company’s code base, allowing it to provide more tailored advice and tips.

Startups are also joining the fight, although they tend to focus more on custom solutions rather than the broader offerings of the largest tech companies. Pythagora, Tusk, and Ellipsis from the latest Y Combinator batch are working on creating apps based on user prompts, AI agents for eliminating bugs, and converting GitHub comments into code, respectively.

Everywhere you look, developers are building tools and services to help their own teams of professionals.

Developers learning to code today will never know a world without the help of AI-driven coding. Call it the graphing calculator era for software developers. But the risk — or worry, I suppose — is that AI tools will eventually be able to do enough work that fewer people will be needed to do them. Write the code for the company itself. If a company can spend less money and hire fewer people, it will; no job is safe, and some roles are harder to replace at any given moment.

Thankfully, given the complexity of modern software services, ever-present technical debt, and countless edge cases, what big tech companies and startups are busy building today appears to be extremely useful coding aids, rather than poised to replace or even reduce things and the number of people who build them. at present. I wouldn’t bet on a multi-decade time frame.