Using AI can cause some of your skills atrophy and therefore your employer needs to take steps to keep you sharp.
“Is there anyone here who's OK with the idea that no one remains in an organization that one day wakes up and knows how to code?” I asked Gartner Distinguided VP Analyst Daryl Plummer yesterday at the keynote address at the company's symposium conference in Australia.
Plummer came up with that scenario because he feels he is using AI coding tools. This means that developers may end up spending their days generating code rather than writing it in the end. “If you don't use your coding skills every day, you lose your coding skills every day,” he added, concluded, “AI is stealing your skills.”
Manjunath Bhat, another prominent VP analyst at Gartner, used the term “skill erosion” in another session at the meeting.
Bhat said recruiting AI coding assistants could cause employers to “experience.” Employers hope that the tool will help younger developers acquire skills and improve performance in months rather than years. That way of thinking creates “experience starvation” – miss learning from being practical, working on many different tasks, leading to “erosion of critical and basic skills.”
He hopes that employers ensure that developers acquire and exercise core critical thinking skills and basic technical skills so that developers can play the role of developers in the AI era.
Plummer also recommended taking steps to maintain critical thinking skills and advised employers to “start regular reviews or tests to ensure that critical skills are not eroded by AI.”
He also suggested that skill erosion is one of the emergence of AI use, and one of the barely identifiable by-products.
“Do you remember getting your first social media account?” he asked. “What is the behavioral byproduct of having the most addictive algorithm in the world on a mobile phone?”
These byproducts are now horribly obvious. “We know it's a scroll hole of fate and a hole with a three-second attention span,” Plummer said.
The aftereffects of AI are difficult to predict, he said, and 91% of CIOs surveyed by Gartner are dedicated to looking for “time.” ®
