SDET here. A year ago when AI came into play SDET/QA roles started disappearing. People were like oh ya anyone can write tests. Then with the recent fiascos about outages and what not, I am seeing the SDE roles are disappearing and SDET roles are going back up?! Apparently AI is good at writing applications but you still need someone to make sure it is doing the right things.
It’s not really good at writing the software either — it’s a moderate to decent productivity booster in an uneven, difficult-to-predict assortment of tasks. Companies are just starting to exit the “we’re still trying to figure this out” grace period. Expect more of that as soon as these chatbot companies have to start charging enough to pull in more money than they spend. I foresee some purpose-built models that are pretty lean being much more useful in long run. It’s neat that the bot which can one-shot a simple CRUD website for you can also crank out Scrubs-based erotic fan fiction novellas by the dozen but I don’t foresee that being a sustainable business model. Having good purpose-built tools is, in my opinion, better than some unwieldy tool that can do a whole bunch of shit I don’t need it to.
Interestingly, the first real productive use of AI that I found was writing the unit tests and integration tests for my applications. It was much better at thinking about corner cases that I was.
