From the AI Assisted Development Trenches...
Today I was in three long meetings and all of those had AI as front and center of the discussions.
It is now pervasive in all of our activities. From software development to troubleshooting that includes log analysis to documentation and any communication. We basically no longer use Google search instead asking GitHub Copilot.
Right now we have around five hundred people in our IT department. About thirty of them are application developers. For now AI is used for all kinds of stuff but people are still writing or changing code.
In six months I am sure there will be no one writing code. We have about three developers on a pilot project where we are refining our specifications driven development.
Right now we support several thousand applications that were developed over the years and slightly over a thousand applications are in dire need of modernization.
We have gotten quotes from a few places for how much it would cost to replace or buy SAS solutions. The quotes we got were in a several million dollars per application.
With thirty developers there is no way we could support ongoing production changes and rewrite over a thousand applications in any reasonable time frame. And we are not getting any new developers any time soon.
So we decided to run a pilot program where we used AI to modernize a few of these. The first three applications that we ran through the pilot were completed in an average time of three days.
Not bad considering Microsoft gave us multimillion quotes for each of those applications. The thing we learned though is the success of the application development using AI depends heavily on very specific instructions that you have to give AI in order for it to generate what you want.
So we are using Spec Kit to create those. And it is a serious amount of work doing that and there is a learning curve involved as well. So now we are refining our process to try to scale this to more developers and not just developers.
People are afraid of AI though and there is resistance to change and thinking that jobs will be lost. In our case the jobs will still be there as we are severely understaffed even with AI. But the jobs themselves will change.
And people are going to become more interchangeable with everyone being able to perform everybody's else's job. The new job is basically writing constitution, skills, constraints for AI.
It is going to be a big change for people... But this stuff is coming and developing at an ever increasing rate. In IT industry we have to accept this and learn how to use the new tools or go out the way of the horse driven carriages...
Today I managed to get a really nice workout in our office gym and because I went to the office I got a really good number of steps. Plus when I got home we have done a water change in all four of our aquariums with my daughter.
It is great that today is Friday!
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