ChatGPT has attracted media attention, it is an AI model that demonstrates businesses, and developers may soon need to reconsider how they work and create software systems.
There are now discussions about ChatGPT’s intelligence, its ability to write secure code, and the merits of citing its sources. However, the success of ChatGPT has led many to wonder how generative AI will affect people’s creative work in fields like marketing, journalism, the arts, and software development.
Over the next three years, generative AI, like ChatGPT and AlphaCode, will significantly impact how organizations develop applications, from enabling quicker and more efficient development cycles to optimizing customer experiences. Businesses can use these models as AI advances to improve customer experiences, raise customer engagement, lower customer service costs, and cut costs generally.
ChatGPT has attracted media attention, it is an AI model that demonstrates businesses, and developers may soon need to reconsider how they work and create software systems.
AI will alter how embedded software developers learn, function, and write code in several ways. Here is how designing, creating, and deploying such systems can benefit from adding AI throughout the development lifecycle.
AI Pair Programming to Speed Up Development
Two developers work side by side to create a software feature using the agile technique known as pair programming. One developer writes the code, acting as the driver, and the other serves as the navigator, checking for accuracy and keeping an eye on the big picture. The challenging part of writing code for an embedded system is not doing it.
Anyone can write code; the trick is ensuring the code is written correctly and does what it needs to. AI models can produce code. The code sandboxes from OpenAI and Github CoPilot both work reasonably well. A great way to increase developer throughput is to pair a human as the navigator with an AI model that will write the code.
Improved Debugging
ChatGPT does an excellent job of pointing out errors in code or making recommendations for improvements. Developers historically spent 20% of their time debugging code, according to the Aspencore 2020 Embedded Marketing Survey. Debug time reduction can prevent months of development costs and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Developers will be assisted in their efforts by AI tools.
This code contains a buffer overflow. The for loop attempts to access an index of 6, which is outside of the array’s bounds and is defined to have a size of 5. Undefined behavior may result, such as overwriting memory that shouldn’t change. The buffer overflow was identified by ChatGPT, along with its cause, potential solutions, and explanation. Finding such a bug might have taken a developer longer than 10 to 20 seconds, particularly if it was a more complicated bug.
Providing Developers with the Correct Guidance
Sometimes some tasks appear that developers have never done before. In these situations, developers must search the internet, research, try a few different things, and eventually figure it out. But sometimes, the process takes longer than necessary. Developers can get started and become proficient much more quickly with AI tools.
For instance, a developer could ask the AI what a software development plan should include before beginning work on a new product. The reply might sound something like this:
An overview of the project’s aims, objectives, and boundaries.
Requirements: A thorough explanation of the software’s functional and non-functional requirements.
Design: A description of the software’s architecture, design, and any pertinent schematics or diagrams.
Schedule: A detailed plan outlining the software development’s tasks, deadlines, and milestones is known as a development schedule.
Testing and quality assurance: A testing and quality assurance strategy that includes all applicable tools and techniques.
Deployment and maintenance: A strategy for putting the software into production and keeping it there
Resource allocation: A description of the project’s necessary resources, such as personnel, tools, and money.
Risk management: A strategy for identifying and minimizing potential risks throughout the project is known as risk management.
The appendices should also include Any additional information pertinent to the project but not covered in the main body of the plan. How businesses and developers write software will change drastically due to tools like ChatGPT, CoPilot, etc. In a multitasking environment, these tools cannot optimize real-time performance or make the appropriate trade-offs to guarantee deadlines are met. But there is great potential for enhancing developers and making them more effective.
Time to market and development budgets are the two main issues that most embedded systems companies deal with. Teams can progress along that path with the assistance of automation and procedures, but AI may solve these problems.
Low code, a productivity tool
Languages and platforms have advanced significantly over the years in software development. Numerous tools help developers work more efficiently, enhance the quality of their code, or automate various steps in the delivery pipeline. For instance, low-code and no-code platforms can assist businesses in creating and modernizing more applications.
However, we’re still writing code for machine-learning tools, customer-facing apps, and micro services. Similar to how low code and no code won’t completely replace traditional software engineers and developers, OpenAI will offer helpful tools that cut out tedious work and shorten the time it takes to launch an app.
One paradigm shift involves moving away from keyword-based search engines to ones that understand natural language queries and provide helpful responses. ChatGPT can automatically generate boilerplate or suggested sample code for issues much faster than any developer can experiment with a code from scratch by taking queries in plain conversational language. Developers will be able to speed up the repetitive choices that engineers must make, like broad inquiries about a language.
Conversational applications’ improvement
Additionally, developers must consider how ChatGPT raises the bar for user expectations. An app’s keyword search function needs to be improved because it produces unsatisfactory results and is not personalized. Employees and customers will expect AI search experiences with natural language queries and apps that answer questions as more people become astounded by ChatGPT’s capabilities.
The potential of generative AIs in search and customer support is enormous. These models show that complex natural language search and contextual memory are accurate and that it is possible to respond conversely to even subtle prompts without a customer service agent very shortly.
Additionally, generative AI can support hyper-automation and enhance workflow by fusing human, automated, and AI capabilities. The use of generative AI technologies to automate and improve various application development and customer experience design processes is extremely promising.
However, using generative AI to implement systematic changes to workflows is difficult. Real-person feedback is necessary to fine-tune generative AI and ensure the model functions correctly. The data and people who created these models’ successes and failures will determine them.
Also Read: The Rise of Quantum Computing: Unlocking the Potential of a Paradigm Shift
Choose the best domains, then check the quality of the responses
So, where can developers of software today use generative AI? Finding coding examples or enhancing code quality are two simple examples of how it can be useful. However, managers and their development teams should validate and test their use cases before integrating generative AI into their applications. When used for customer service or representing a brand, the risk of unmanaged AI producing inaccurate or incomplete content can, at best, be mildly annoying and, in other cases, extremely expensive.
To manage this risk, brands will quickly realize that they must use a combined strategy where humans and AI work together, despite the initial temptation to let AI alone in content generation, such as an unmonitored chatbot. ChatGPT is more than a trend. Software designers and architects must confirm where, when, and how to use generative AI capabilities.
