AI Assisted Programming

An AI assisted programming environment is where the business is heading. I have the pleasure of working with Repl.it and learned the power of integrated AI. I think it must feel like it did for programmers back in the day when intellisense was invented. Suddenly one was no longer required to have memorized everything about Python. Instead intellisense offered the possible selections available for the object or line of code. It really speeds up coding. In the AI world it goes a step further, you don’t even need to know how to code very well. During a practice coding session I was using the Repl.it online IDE and I laid down my first bit of code to create a dictionary. I defined a single item in that dictionary and as I was thinking about the 2nd item the AI automatically suggested 3 more items and the context was correct. Now I didn’t want those items and I can choose to apply the suggestion or not just like working with other predictive text components. As I continued writing code the AI component continued to offer suggestions each time I paused to think about what I was going to write. I’m not kidding when I say in the time it takes to start thinking about something, AI has already written it. This is true even for entire blocks of code. After defining response=input(“(A)dd, (L)ook, (C)ount and (Q)uit”) the AI engine automatically wrote the entire if-else block of code including the code to execute the implied function.

There is a paid level that includes more powerful AI features. I’m about to learn those and put together a discussion session with my developer friends.