Dive Brief:
- The number of enterprise software engineers that use AI-powered coding tools to complete tasks is expected to snowball in the next four years, according to Gartner research published Thursday.
- The analyst firm projects 75% of software engineers will use AI coding assistants by 2028. It’s a significant spike from less than 10% of enterprise software developers who said they had deployed AI-powered coding tools early last year.
- Nearly two-thirds of organizations are in pilot or deployment stages with AI coding tools, according to a Gartner survey of 598 global respondents in Q3 2023.
Dive Insight:
Vendors have targeted coding capabilities for generative AI upgrades and analysts have promoted the technology as a worthy companion for software development tasks.
But AI-powered coding tools, like most generative AI technologies, bring their own set of risks that challenge enterprise progress. Researchers have questioned whether the proliferation of AI-powered coding capabilities has resulted in higher levels of code churn and decreased code quality.
Security fears present another roadblock. Around half of organizations haven’t updated software security practices to adapt to the tools, which often have access to critical code bases, according to a Snyk survey.
Ensuring generated code is production-ready has also proven difficult. More than half of organizations encounter insecure, generated code sometimes or frequently, according to the survey, making the need for guardrails paramount.
Still, organizations want the value these tools can bring.
“Calculating time savings on code generation is a good place to begin building a more robust value story,” Philip Walsh, senior principal analyst at Gartner, said in a release last week.
But conveying the full enterprise value for AI code assistants will require software engineering leaders to analyze the overall return to the organization, from reducing task switching and technical debt to enhancing the developer experience, according to Walsh.
