Software engineering is undergoing a revolution through the use of the latest-generation AI, with some developers in leading high-tech companies telling Omdia they are letting the latest tools generate 100% of application code, with the human role acting in a supervisory and guiding function. The pace of improvement is such that agentic AI systems comprising multiple AI agents can now undertake complex tasks that would, in the past, have been taken up by a development team.
The state of the software development market today
With many businesses still on the adoption curve of cloud native technologies, there is a crisis for many as they try to keep up with digital transformation and modernize enterprise applications that are mission-critical and must be done right, while freeing resources to innovate and compete with startups. Against this background is one of the largest transformative technologies yet conceived: AI. Since ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, the competing players in what are called frontier large language models (LLMs) have pushed the capabilities of AI to the point that developers today speak of a phase change: the reliability of AI generated code is so high in some organizations that developers let the machine generate the bulk of application code and instead take on new roles to supervise the AI.