Today, AI-powered software development tools are allowing people to build software solutions using the same language that they use when they talk to other people. These AI-powered tools translate natural language into the programming languages that computers understand.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat allows you, as a developer, to have an intent to accomplish something in your head that you can express in natural language and this technology translates it into code that achieves the intent you have,\u201d Scott said. \u201cThat\u2019s a fundamentally different way of thinking about development than we\u2019ve had since the beginning of software.\u201d<\/p>\n
This paradigm shift is driven by Codex<\/a>, a machine learning model from AI research and development company OpenAI<\/a> that can translate natural language commands into code in more than a dozen programming languages.<\/p>\n Codex descended from GPT-3, OpenAI\u2019s natural language model that was trained on petabytes of language data from the internet. Codex was trained on this language data as well as code from GitHub software repositories and other public sources.<\/p>\n \u201cIt makes coding more productive in terms of removing not-so-fun work and also helping you remember things you might have forgotten and helping you with the approach to solve problems,\u201d Peter Welinder, vice president of products and partnerships for OpenAI, said of Codex.<\/p>\n The increase in productivity that Codex brings to software development is a game changer, according to Scott. It allows developers to accomplish many tasks in two minutes that previously took two hours.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd oftentimes, the things that the tools are doing is they are helping you to very quickly go through the least interesting parts of your job so that you can get to the most interesting parts of your job, which makes the qualitative experience of creating much more pleasant and stimulating and fun,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Microsoft and OpenAI formed a partnership in 2019<\/a> to accelerate breakthroughs in AI \u2013 including jointly developing some of the world\u2019s most powerful AI supercomputers<\/a> \u2013 and deliver them to developers to build the next generation of AI applications through Azure OpenAI Service<\/a>.<\/p>\n Microsoft subsidiary GitHub also worked with OpenAI to integrate Codex into GitHub Copilot<\/a>, a downloadable extension for software development programs such as Visual Studio Code. The tool uses Codex to draw context from a developer\u2019s existing code to suggest additional lines of code and functions. Developers can also describe what they want to accomplish in natural language, and Copilot will draw on its knowledge base and current context to surface an approach or solution.<\/p>\n GitHub Copilot, released in a technical preview in June 2021, today suggests about 35% of the code in popular languages like Java and Python generated by the tens of thousands of developers in the technical preview who regularly use GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot will move to general availability this summer, bringing this AI-assisted coding capability to millions of professional developers, Microsoft announced today at its Microsoft Build developer\u2019s conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of software has common frameworks and pieces of scaffolding. Copilot does such an awesome job of doing all that for you so you can focus your energy and your creativity on the things that you\u2019re trying to solve uniquely,\u201d said Julia Liuson, president of the developer division at Microsoft, which includes GitHub.<\/p>\n As more developers experiment with Codex and GitHub Copilot, more clues to the potential of AI-assisted development are emerging, according to Welinder. For example, natural language documentation inside most software programs is sparse. Users of GitHub Copilot create this documentation by default as they use the tool.<\/p>\n \u201cYou get a bunch of comments in the code just from the nature of telling Copilot what to do,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re documenting the code as you go, which is mind-blowing.\u201d<\/p>\n These comments, in turn, serve as a teaching tool for other developers, who often study other programs to learn how to solve specific problems in their own programs. The ability of Codex to translate from code to natural language is another way developers can learn as they program, which will lower the barrier of entry to coding, Welinder added.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, AI-powered low code and no code tools, such as those available through Microsoft Power Platform<\/a>, aim to enable billions of people to develop the software applications<\/a> that they need to solve their unique problems, from an audiologist<\/a> digitizing simple paper forms to transform hearing loss prevention in Australia to a tool<\/a> that relieves the burden of manual data-entry work from employees of a family owned business and an enterprise grade solution<\/a> that processes billions of dollars of COVID-19 loan forgiveness claims for small businesses.<\/p>\n Today, the hundreds of millions of people who are comfortable working with formulas in Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program, could easily bring these skills into Power Platform where they can build these types of software applications, according to Charles Lamanna, Microsoft corporate vice president of business applications and platform.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the big pushes we\u2019ve been doing is to go to the next level, to go from hundreds of millions of people that can use these tools to billions of people that can use these tools,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the only way we think we can actually do that is to go from low code to no code by using AI-powered development.\u201d<\/p>\n To do this, Lamanna\u2019s team first integrated GPT-3 with Microsoft Power Apps<\/a> for a feature called Power App Ideas, which allows people to create applications using conversational language in Power Fx, an open-source programming language for low code development with its origins in Microsoft Excel. The next step, announced at Build, is a feature called Power Apps express design<\/a>, which leverages AI models from Azure Cognitive Services<\/a> to turn drawings, images, PDFs and Figma design files into software applications.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve made it so that we can do image recognition and map it to the constructs that exist within an application. We understand what\u2019s a button, what\u2019s a grouping, what\u2019s a text box and generate an application automatically based on those drawings without you having to understand and wire up all these different components,\u201d Lamanna said.<\/p>\n YouTube Video<\/p>\n![\"Example](\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/how-ai-makes-developers-lives-easier-and-helps-everybody-learn-to-develop-software.jpg\")
<\/a>AI and code come together<\/h2>\n
![\"Julia](\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/how-ai-makes-developers-lives-easier-and-helps-everybody-learn-to-develop-software-1.jpg\")
<\/a>From low code to no code<\/h2>\n
![\"Charles](\"https:\/\/www.sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/how-ai-makes-developers-lives-easier-and-helps-everybody-learn-to-develop-software-2.jpg\")
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