Technology Giants Promote AI Programming Internally

On April 2nd, Alibaba Cloud announced that it is comprehensively implementing AI programming internally, using the TONGYI Lingma to help programmers write code, read code, debug bugs, optimize code and more. Alibaba Cloud has also assigned a formal employee ID – AI001 to TONGYI Lingma. Insiders revealed: “20% of the company’s future code will be written by Tylor Code, but programmers are still at the core of R&D. They will have more time to focus on system design and core business development.”

In traditional development mode, programmers need to spend a lot of energy every day writing repetitive code, debugging and optimizing, writing code comments and other basic work, which greatly squeezes the time for writing core business code.

To balance effectiveness and efficiency, ‘AI programmers’ have emerged. According to reports, within Alibaba Cloud, TONGYI Lingma has been serving as a code assistant in various development stages. Taking API development testing work as an example, TONGYI Lingma can shorten the time-consuming manual writing of tests from tens of minutes to seconds, saving more than 70% of the testing code workload for programmers.

In fact, not only Alibaba Cloud, the figure of ‘AI programmer’ has appeared in the employee list of many technology companies. Not long ago, the startup company Cognition launched the world’s first AI software engineer Devin, who is said to be able to autonomously learn unfamiliar technologies and even self-repair bugs. Earlier, Fu Sheng, Chairman and CEO of Cheetah Mobile, announced through personal social media that a new product called ‘OrionStar AI Code Generator’ will be launched soon.

AI replacing programmers may be an industry trend. Baidu, Inc. founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li has publicly stated that there will basically no longer be the profession of programmer in the future, because as long as one can speak, everyone will have the ability of a programmer. NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang also said that in the future everyone can become a programmer.

Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of 360 Group, does not agree with the above view. He believes that the demand for programmers will not decrease in the next ten years. ‘In the AI era, computer experts and programmers are even more needed, and they may have the most say in various industries.’

Currently, AI as a tool has indeed lowered the threshold for programmers. It is understood that due to the significant development of AI programming tools, it is breaking the boundaries of programming languages, allowing Java programmers to easily complete code writing in different programming languages such as Python and C. Alibaba Cloud also revealed that in the future, they will fully integrate TONGYI Lingma plugins into internal JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio Code, and other development tools for all employees to use.

However, the creativity and innovative thinking possessed by top programmers cannot currently be replaced by AI. Some experts claim that AI still has limitations in handling complex situations and multidimensional decision-making, such as facing challenges in understanding and adapting to human emotions, intentions, and communication styles.

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