AI is turning software programming into a assembly chain

AI is not only transforming the labor market, but also It is changing the nature of the work itself and the tasks that They make up every position.

What was previously a highly Specialized and well paidlike that of Software Engineernow Run risk If becoming much more routine, segmented and, above all, accelerated. Something closer to an operator in a assembly chain. According to The New York Timessome Amazon engineers already begin to feel like that.

From the industrial revolution to digital automation

The impact of AI is already beginning to be noticed among the Technology template. Not so much for the destruction of jobs, as for the transformation of Those who already existed.

Often It is equated The arrival of AI with the Industrial Revolution for the change of technological paradigm that was lived. The History has demonstrated that, in the medium term, the automation was not linked to the destruction of employment, but to A displacement and transformation of labor tasks.

During the industrial revolution, and then with the passage to Model ‘Fordist’ Mass production with assembly chain, no jobs were destroyed. Its nature was changed. With the Ford assembly chain, the manufacture of cars in workshops was replaced in an artisanal way, by workers located in A assembly line They specialized in doing a very specific task. That was the key to Increase productivity and reduce costs.

Automation allowed workers to will focus on specific functionswhile the machines assumed the heaviest or repetitive work. According to A study conducted by MIT researchers and the University of Pennsylvania, Amazon, Google and Microsoft are using their AI tools in a similar way.

Software operators

With the As a co -pilotlarge technological ones are automating certain tasks of their software engineers that previously required working hours. That liberated time dedicate it to Improve existing products or get new products in less development time.

That is, this process is taking a new level, where IA begins to play the role equivalent to industrial machinery of the nineteenth century.

Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of Amazon, acknowledged in A LinkedIn post That thanks to this automation with AI, the company had “saved the equivalent of 4,500 years of development work.”

Amazon logistics centers can serve as an example of what is happening now in their software development offices. Some years ago, the employees who prepared Amazon shipments had to travel the long halls of their stores to gather the products of each order. However, now technology It has robotized This whole process to eliminate that search task.

With the automation of its centers It has not been dispensed with of those jobs, but are now dedicated to specific tasks. of packaging, the number of orders that each employee can process and His work has been devalued.

That warehouse staff now assures that his work is monotonousrepetitive and poorly paid. The same that happened with the operators of the assembly chains. Software engineers begin to notice the same symptoms, with an acceleration of their workflows and greater automation.

“If they tell you that you have to review the code, it is never a fun part of work. When you work with these tools (of AI attendance), it is most of the work,” assured Simon Willison, veteran programmer and blogger.

The consequences of this automation are already beginning to be noticed in the Junior positions of different sectorsand the programming is exempt. The agents of Which generate code They do the task that the Junior previously developed and, of that practice, acquired the experience that allowed them to ascend.

Without this learning, senior engineers will not be trained that tomorrow can review the code generated by an AI and detect errors, or face adequate development strategies.

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Image | AmazonUnspash (Adrian Sulyok, Global UI UX Design Agency procreator, Kseniia Ilinykh)