Where does Extreme Programming fit in the new AI world we’re moving into?
I’ve explored a couple of the key practices that have had the biggest impact on my career to date.
But these practices are just a reflection of the values and principles that underpin XP.
One of the principles, ‘Economics’, is hanging over the software engineering industry like a cloud at the moment, an Artificially Intelligent Sword of Damocles that seems to be swaying with increasing menace above developers’ heads. The prospect of automation is already being felt by juniors and more widely.
Reading them through, one that stands out is ‘Humanity’.
As
states, ‘people develop software’.There may well be a future coming where that no longer holds true. Where the machines are able to create their own software, for their own purposes and under their own autonomy.
But I return once more to my ‘line’ about AI, which is that it will force us to do what only humans can do, to be what only humans can be.
There is so much joy in collaborating with other humans to create software of value that it will persist as an activity for long into the future.
Whether it will exist in any economically meaningful way is a different question.
Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up this mini-series on XP and AI.
The final limits of Extreme Programming in the AI epoch
Does XP have any relevance, then, in the coming AI age?