As cloud development has evolved, teams have benefitted from several innovations that significantly increased productivity, such as advanced debuggers, modern IDEs and Notebooks, online communities, and cloud computing services. Despite this, organizations continue to struggle with a chronic shortage of developers with desired skills. Moreover, developers often face numerous challenges, some of which are particularly relevant to cloud development, including:
However, the recent growth of generative AI has introduced new opportunities for businesses and developers alike with large language models (LLMs) — AI models trained on massive sets of textual data to produce relevant responses to requests in natural language. This novel technology opens up fresh use cases for developers by enhancing their software development process and, more significantly, driving increased productivity.
With the explosion of tools available in the market, a common question we hear from customers is: How can I evaluate which solution best fits my organization’s needs?
Due to their ability to synthesize and generalize patterns from massive training data, LLMs can enhance every part of the software development lifecycle, improving productivity with capabilities that can complete, transform, explain code, generate tests in IDEs and even do agentic workflows.
Here are some of the benefits of incorporating generative AI into software development:
As enterprises adopt these transformational technologies, it’s important to put measures in place to assess and quantify their impact. Measuring productivity gains is a nuanced process, and it’s critical to resist the urge to only run narrow, task-specific experiments. They tend to give overly optimistic results that do not generalize when looking at productivity gains for typical day-to-day tasks.
While there are some obvious leading impact indicators — including adoption, suggestion acceptance rate, and tool retention — lagging indicators provide a more accurate picture. Measuring indicators, such as the reduction in coding iteration time and the amount of new code generated from AI tools, may offer a better understanding of their productivity impact.
While generative AI has strong potential, it’s still in the early stages of widespread adoption, with many organizations just starting to evaluate use cases and launch pilots. Here are some key considerations and questions that can help guide you:
Understand your business needs and use cases. Before implementing generative AI, you should know why you need it and how it can help you achieve your development and business goals. Some questions to ask include:
Protect your IP and customer privacy. Protecting your intellectual property and sensitive data when working with generative AI is vital to maintain your unique competitive advantage and prevent any misuse of your work. Equally important is customer privacy, as safeguarding sensitive data fosters customer trust and complies with regulatory requirements. Questions your organization needs to think about include:
Find the right solution. To make sure the solution you choose can work with your existing technology stack and meet the specific needs of your organization, there are many factors you should consider, such as:
Consider organizational culture and processes. AI-powered developer assistance is one more tool in your productivity toolset, and having the right culture and processes can maximize its impact. Be sure to ask questions like:
As you go through the journey with generative AI for coding, remember that this is not a one-time endeavor. The models and the products built on these technologies are evolving rapidly, and an increasingly large choice of tools means that a more holistic approach is needed to ensure organizations identify and adopt the best tools available for their development teams.
By harnessing the power of AI-driven developer assistance, such as Duet AI assisted development, businesses can unlock unprecedented levels of productivity and efficiency in software development, paving the way for a new era of innovation and growth. Sign up here to join Duet AI’s Private Preview.
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