Developers are some of the most highly skilled and heavily paid workers in the tech world. But when it comes down to it, developers get to do very little of what they actually want to do: coding.
Amazon Web Services said in a post on Tuesday that developers report spending an average of “just one hour per day” on actual coding. But that doesn’t mean these workers twiddle their thumbs the remaining seven hours per day.
Instead, developers spend the majority of their time on “tedious, undifferentiated tasks such as learning codebases, writing and reviewing documentation, testing, managing deployments, troubleshooting issues or finding and fixing vulnerabilities,” according to Amazon Web Services.
But thanks to artificial intelligence, developers may be able to offload some of that tedious work. AWS announced new capabilities for its AI-powered assistant tool, Amazon Q Developer, which can help developers design, build, test, deploy and maintain software. This new product will “give more time back to developers to enable creativity and innovation,” Jessica Feng, senior manager of Amazon Q Developer at AWS, said during the company’s re:Invent event on Tuesday.
“We know the traditional software development lifecycle can be improved,” Feng said. “It currently requires developers to write code, to spend a lot of time debugging. The process often hampers productivity and people get bogged down with repetitive tasks.”
AWS introduced Amazon Q Developer to its customers in last year two tiers: one free and one paid at $19 per month per user. Both offerings promise to let developers code faster and review code licenses with reference tracking, among other features, but the paid tier allows for more controls and customizations.
Other tech giants, including Google, have also started relying more on AI in software development. In fact, AI systems are now responsible for generating more than 25% of new code for Google’s products, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said recently.
“We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency,” Pichai said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call in October. The AI-generated code is then reviewed and accepted by engineers, which “helps our engineers do more and move faster,” Pichai said.
Will AI take over software development?
Although Amazon Q Developer may ease workflows for developers and allow them to be more productive with coding, it could be another sign of how AI is taking over certain jobs and tasks. The Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist Christopher Mims argues “software is eating the software industry.”
“Tech layoffs over the past year, driven by macroeconomic trends, happen to have come just as genuinely useful AI for coding has arrived,” Mims wrote in 2023. “For many young coders, the timing is unfortunate.”
Data from workforce-analytics company Revelio Labs shows companies tend to fire their newest employees, and software engineers made up the largest share of tech layoffs in 2023. Still, software development continues to be a lucrative career path, with their median total pay hitting $132,000 this year, according to Glassdoor.
Others, however, argue AI isn’t sophisticated enough yet to completely take over developer jobs. Plus, AI advancements will require the continued work of software developers, according to online learning platform Coursera.
“While there are likely to be some changes to these job roles, a complete elimination of these roles is less likely to happen—at least for quite some time,” according to Coursera. “In fact, programmers and software engineers are driving many of the AI advancements we enjoy today.”
Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS VP of AI and data also wrote in an article published by Business Insider that AI could be used to create job promotion, and not just be a job replacement.
“I believe that AI isn’t coming to take away jobs—it’s coming to take away tasks,” Sivasubramanian wrote. “80% of employees’ time is consumed by low-value, repetitive, time-intensive, uninteresting tasks, while only 20% gets devoted to the more interesting activities that generate higher value for the organization.”