Roundup of AI Jobs, Tools, and Trends for Developers

By FOSSlife Team, 02 August, 2023

AI is having a huge impact on our world, and the related tools and technology are affecting software development in particular. A recent GitHub survey, for example, says 92 percent of US-based developers are already using AI coding tools both inside and outside work, and 70 percent think that AI coding tools will offer advantages such as better code quality and faster completion time.

And, this McKinsey study says generative AI does help software developers complete tasks “up to twice as fast,” particularly in the following areas:

Expediting manual and repetitive work
Jump-starting the first draft of new code
Accelerating updates to existing code
Increasing developers’ ability to tackle new challenges

To help you navigate this quickly changing landscape, we’ve put together a selection of articles relating to new AI tools and career opportunities.

AI Tools and Trends

In this section, we share articles that not only cover various coding tools but also provide context for those tools and how they are created and used. Let’s take a closer look at these resources:

How AI Will impact the developer experience — Generative AI is not the first new technology that has changed how software developers work, notes Trisha Gee. “AI is another productivity tool and should be seen as an addition to the developer’s toolkit, rather than a replacement for developers. A developer’s expertise and experience will be needed to leverage this technology effectively. Additionally, developers will still need to think strategically about the business problem at hand — a part of the job that AI isn’t suited to handle,” Gee says.

How Coders Can Survive — and Thrive — in a ChatGPT World — Rina Diane Caballar offers tips for programmers for using generative AI and recommends taking a critical approach to incorporating tools into your workflow. “Each tool has its own ways to interact with it, and there are different ways to incorporate each tool into your development workflow — whether that’s automating the creation of unit tests, generating test data, or writing documentation,” Caballar says.

LLMs and the rise of the AI code generators — Martin Heller provides a brief history of large language models (LLMs) and surveys the current state of the art. He also takes a quick tour of code-generation tools, including:

Radar Trends to Watch: July 2023 — Mike Loukides provides a list of new AI tools and trends to consider in a recent O’Reilly Radar installment. “A surprising number of the entries for AI are about generative models that don’t generate text or artwork — specifically, they generate human voices or music,” Loukides says.

AI Jobs and Skills

With the rapid proliferation of these tools comes the need for new skills and the rise of new career opportunities. This section contains resources to help you understand the emerging trends in terms of machine learning and AI-related jobs and skills.

Global Outlook for AI Jobs and Skills — More than 795,000 AI jobs were posted in 2022 in the United States alone, says the AI Index report, and the top skill areas within those job postings were:

Machine learning
Artificial intelligence
Natural language processing
Neural networks
Autonomous driving
Visual image recognition
Robotics

Lack of LLM Developers Impacting AI Ecosystem — As a relatively novel technology, LLMs are still in the early stages of adoption, which means there is a limited pool of developers with experience in this area, says Nathan Eddy. “Building applications with LLMs is not straightforward, and specific challenges are related to prompt engineering and handling the ambiguity of natural language processing," the article says.

The new high-paying jobs in generative AI — David Linthicum says “the push to adopt generative AI in the cloud will lead to new roles and needed skills, and enterprises will likely pay top dollar.” Such new roles include: