The AI programmer, introduced by Alibaba Cloud, aims to help developers slash application development time, in some cases to within minutes, the company said in a statement on Friday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
According to the statement, the AI programmer will act as a “multi-intelligence agent” and combine the roles of software architect, development engineer and test engineer to deliver end-to-end product functionality.
“The development paradigm of software applications is changing,” Xu Dong, general manager of Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qianwen LLM Service, said at the company’s Cloud AI Summit in Shanghai on Friday.
“In the future, it will be the norm for users to simply identify their problems, express their requirements, and complete application development in minutes,” Xu said.
Alibaba Cloud said its AI programmers can handle tasks such as teardown, coding, testing and debugging, all played out at once through multiple conversations with users.
In a live demonstration at the summit, an AI programmer built an application from scratch in under 10 minutes, a process that the company said might take half a day using traditional methods.
But human programmers have expressed mixed feelings about the product. Liang Yang, a developer who has worked in the cryptocurrency industry for four years, said the AI programmers could be a threat.
“My job is mainly to select open source projects and learn from them,” Liang says. “Not only to fulfill my requirements, but also as a way to understand the programs.”
AI programmers may save development time, but they may not understand what the programmers are doing, Liang said, and they also reduce opportunities for novice programmers.
Yang Yi, who works at a major Chinese tech company and has tried other coding tools for AI programmers, said the tools are still in the early stages of development.
“We asked the AI to write specific code, but the generated code was not very reliable and sometimes had grammatical or factual errors,” Yang said. “It reduces the workload, but it doesn’t reduce it completely.”
The release of AI Programmer comes seven months after the introduction of Tongyi Lingma, Alibaba Cloud’s first AI coding assistant, also powered by Tongyi Qianwen.
Trained on open-source code, Tongyi Lingma can generate code based on natural language instructions, run unit tests, and debug and optimize code.
The basic version of Tongyi Lingma is available for free for personal users, while the enterprise version with additional management features is available for 159 RMB (US$22) per person per month for a minimum of 100 users.
Aimed at both individual and corporate developers, the newly introduced AI Programmer is not yet available to the public, and the company said it did not disclose pricing details.