Software development and AI

The emergence of powerful AI systems like ChatGPT has sparked great interest in using AI as a tool to assist software developers. A June 2023 report by KPMG estimated that about 25% of software development tasks could be automated away. A McKinsey report from the same month highlighted software development as a function, where generative AI can have a significant impact in terms of cost reduction and efficiency gain.

The history of software development has been marked by efforts to increase abstraction from machine code to focus more on problem-solving. Early procedural languages like FORTRAN and COBOL in the 1950s enabled this by introducing control structures, variables, and other high-level constructs. As programs grew larger, structured programming concepts emerged to improve code organization through modularity, encapsulation, and stepwise refinement. Object-oriented languages like Simula and Smalltalk in the 1960s-70s introduced new paradigms...