May 2025
Intermediate to advanced
118 pages
2h 34m
English
Content preview from The AI-Enabled SDLC
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Chapter 10. From AI Assistant to AI Engineer: The Future of AI in Software Development
Now that you understand the AI-enabled SDLC and how you can leverage AI assistants in your workflow today, let’s take it a step further. This chapter ventures into a near future where AI agents can complete software engineering tasks autonomously; we refer to this evolution of the AI agent as the AI engineer.
At this point, you may wonder what the difference is between an AI assistant and an AI engineer, as the assistant can also complete certain tasks autonomously (e.g., “Document this code”). The key difference is the ability to handle more complex, custom tasks requiring analysis, planning, making decisions, and potentially changing multiple artifacts.
With an AI assistant, as discussed in earlier chapters of this book, the human is tightly integrated into the process and effectively delegates microtasks to the assistant. The software developer requests specific tasks (e.g., “Document this function,” “Generate unit tests,” “Refactor this code”) and reviews each incremental change made by the AI.
In contrast, when working with an AI engineer, the expectations are that the human engineer delegates larger tasks to the AI engineer (e.g., “Add a coupon discount flow to our checkout process”) and that the AI engineer completes this task from start to finish, similar to a human engineer. The workflow evolves from depending on a close human feedback loop to a more general delegation of tasks. However, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.