Automated coding assistants using generative AI have been growing fast, raising nearly $1bn in funding since the beginning of the last year; the software engineering domain has thus emerged as one of the biggest application fields of generative AI. The new cohort of startups, including Replit, Anysphere, Magic, Augment, Supermaven, and Poolside AI, has closed 79 investments this year, for $433m; the total funding since January 2023 is $906m.
This increase in investment shows the actual opinion that computer programming is one of the first occupations to be impacted greatly by AI. Scholars in the industry disaggregate and expound that AI is disrupting software engineering saying that to code without AI is as good as writing without a word processing tool.
While the interest in AI-written code in Silicon Valley increases, there are doubts related to whether Big Tech gets enough revenues from its giant investments in AI tools. Those investors like Hannah Seal from Index Ventures believe that there is a great opportunity to make money on AI by integrating it into the existing processes, and it is clear that coding is one of the first areas where such an integration makes sense.
This is one sector that the big technology companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google etc. are heavily competing on. They are creating AI tools that can write and edit codes meaning to program more is much easier and time saving. For example, Microsoft via its GitHub was one of the pioneers in this domain With launching GitHub Copilot in 2022. This particular AI helper has been driving nearly 2 million paying customers to GitHub and contributing to more than 40% of this year’s company revenues.
There is still controversy regarding the use of AI coding tools even in the present generation most especially so concerning the security challenges posed by use of AI codes in production. However, the companies that have adopted the tools note that productivity has improved between 20-35%. It is used to draft code, correct it and even to refactor it.