I wrote this article as a deep-dive for the Digital Skills and Jobs Platform of the European Commission. This article was written in the summer of 2023, when the excitement around GenAI was scaling up. As this technology emerged, we saw it disrupting productivity activities on different fronts and across different modalities (text, image, video, etc.).
I focussed here on the way GenAI was projected to change the way we programme our software and how we write code.
The article delves into how GenAI works, and how it is effecting the way we develop our written products, in this case, our coding. It positions the act of coding into a larger perspective of software design and development, as well posing crucial questions on the quality of outcomes. The article focusses on the challenges that this new technology poses on skill development and expertise growth in programmers.
By extension, similar opportunities and challenges affect other domains too: the advent of GenAI tools calls into question what we understand under the notion of “professional expertise“, how we train our professionals and how we define and assess the quality of their work.
You can find the whole article on DSJP.