The report, titled ‘The State of AI in Software Development,’ presents insights from over 1,000 global senior technology executives, developers, and security and operations professionals.

The report reveals a complex relationship between enthusiasm for AI adoption and concerns about data privacy, intellectual property, and security.

“Enterprises are seeking out platforms that allow them to harness the power of AI while addressing potential privacy and security risks,” said Alexander Johnston, Research Analyst in the Data, AI & Analytics Channel at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence.

While 83 percent of the survey’s respondents view AI implementation as essential to stay competitive, a significant 79 percent expressed worries about AI tools accessing sensitive information and intellectual property.

Impact on developer productivity

AI is perceived as a boon for developer productivity, with 51 percent of all respondents citing it as a key benefit of AI implementation. However, security professionals are apprehensive that AI-generated code might lead to an increase in security vulnerabilities, potentially creating more work for them.

Only seven percent of developers’ time is currently spent identifying and mitigating security vulnerabilities, compared to 11 percent allocated to testing code. This raises questions about the widening gap between developers and security professionals in the AI era.

Privacy and intellectual property concerns

The survey underscores the paramount importance of data privacy and intellectual property protection when selecting AI tools. 95 percent of senior technology executives prioritise these aspects when choosing AI solutions.

Moreover, 32 percent of respondents admitted to being “very” or “extremely” concerned about introducing AI into the software development lifecycle. Within this group, 39 percent cited worries about AI-generated code introducing security vulnerabilities, and 48 percent expressed concerns that AI-generated code may not receive the same copyright protection as code produced by humans.

AI skills gap

Despite optimism about AI’s potential, the report identifies a disconnect between organisations’ provision of AI training resources and practitioners’ satisfaction with them. 

While 75 percent of respondents stated that their organisations offer training and resources for using AI, an equivalent proportion expressed the need to seek resources independently—suggesting that the available training may be insufficient.

A striking 81 percent of respondents said they require more training to effectively utilise AI in their daily work. Furthermore, 65 percent of those planning to use AI for software development indicated that their organsations plan to hire new talent to manage AI implementation.

David DeSanto, Chief Product Officer at GitLab, said:

“According to the GitLab Global DevSecOps Report, only 25 percent of developers’ time is spent on code generation, but the data shows AI can boost productivity and collaboration in nearly 60 percent of developers’ day-to-day work.

To realise AI’s full potential, it needs to be embedded across the software development lifecycle, allowing everyone involved in delivering secure software – not just developers – to benefit from the efficiency boost.” 

While AI holds immense promise for the software development industry, GitLab’s report makes it clear that addressing cybersecurity and privacy concerns, bridging the skills gap, and fostering collaboration between developers and security professionals are pivotal to successful AI adoption.

(Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash)

See also: UK government outlines AI Safety Summit plans

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Using the feature, developers can “brush” over their code to see it update in real-time.

Several different brushes are included to achieve various aims. For example, one brush makes code more readable—especially important when coding as part of a team or contributing to open-source projects.

Here are the other included brushes:

• Add types
• Fix bug
• Debug (adds debugging statements)
• Make robust (improves compatibility)

Code Brushes also supports the creation of custom brushes. One example is a brush to make a form “more accessible” automatically.

“As we explore enhancing developers’ workflows with machine learning, we’re focused on how to empower developers instead of automating them,” explained GitHub.

“This was one of many explorations we have in the works along those lines.”

Code Brushes is powered by the controversial GitHub Copilot. Copilot uses technology from OpenAI to help generate code and speed up software development.

GitHub-owner Microsoft and OpenAI were hit with a class-action lawsuit over Copilot last year. The case aims to investigate whether Copilot infringes on the rights of developers by scraping their code and not providing due attribution.

“Users likely face growing liability that only increases as Copilot improves,” explained Bradley M. Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this year.

“Users currently have no methods besides serendipity and educated guesses to know whether Copilot’s output is copyrighted by someone else.”

Code Brushes has been added to the Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension. The extension requires a Copilot license which costs $10/month or $100/year.

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The paper, titled ‘Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?’, examines developers’ use of AI coding assistants like the controversial GitHub Copilot.

“Participants with access to an AI assistant often produced more security vulnerabilities than those without access, with particularly significant results for string encryption and SQL injection,” the authors wrote.

The paper also found that developers using AI assistants have misguided confidence in the quality of their code.

“We also found that participants [that were] provided access to an AI assistant were more likely to believe that they wrote secure code than those without access to the AI assistant,” added the authors.

47 people were asked to write code in response to several prompts as part of the study. Some participants were given AI assistance while the rest did not.

The first prompt was to “Write two functions in Python where one encrypts and the other decrypts a given string using a given symmetric key.”

For that prompt, 79 percent of the coders without AI assistance gave a correct answer. That’s compared to 67 percent of the group with assistance.

In addition, the assisted group was determined to be “significantly more likely to provide an insecure solution (p < 0.05, using Welch’s unequal variances t-test), and also significantly more likely to use trivial ciphers, such as substitution ciphers (p < 0.01), and not conduct an authenticity check on the final returned value.”

One participant allegedly quipped that they hope AI assistance gets deployed because “it’s like [developer Q&A community] Stack Overflow but better, because it never tells you that your question was dumb.”

Last month, OpenAI and Microsoft were hit with a lawsuit over their GitHub Copilot assistant. Copilot is trained on “billions of lines of public code … written by others”.

The lawsuit alleges that Copilot infringes on the rights of developers by scraping their code and not providing due attribution. Developers that use code suggested by Copilot could unwittingly be infringing copyright.

“Copilot leaves copyleft compliance as an exercise for the user. Users likely face growing liability that only increases as Copilot improves,” wrote Bradley M. Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this year.

To summarise: Developers using current AI assistants risk producing buggier, less secure, and potentially litigable code.

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The company selected 10 contests that were hosted on Codeforces – a programming competition platform with thousands of participants – to evaluate the performance of AlphaCode.

Below is an example of a problem #AlphaCode can successfully solve, using the exact information seen on @codeforces, & the program that #AlphaCode writes.

By @liyuajia, David Choi, @junyoungch, @NateKushman, @Mononofu, @RemiLeblond, Tom Eccles, James Keeling, @FelixAxelGimeno 2/ pic.twitter.com/TJu0Va46OS

— DeepMind (@DeepMind) February 2, 2022

Following the simulations, AlphaCode ranked in the top 54 percent of competitors. That means it wasn’t yet able to beat leading human programmers but could rival the average.

Mike Mirzayanov, Founder of Codeforces, said:

“I can safely say the results of AlphaCode exceeded my expectations. I was sceptical because even in simple competitive problems it is often required not only to implement the algorithm, but also – and this is the most difficult part – to invent it.

AlphaCode managed to perform at the level of a promising new competitor. I can’t wait to see what lies ahead!”

AlphaCode uses transformer-based language models to generate code “at an unprecedented scale”. A preprint paper detailing AlphaCode is available here (PDF).

Petr Mitrichev, Software Engineer at Google, commented:

“Solving competitive programming problems is a really hard thing to do, requiring both good coding skills and problem-solving creativity in humans.

I was very impressed that AlphaCode could make progress in this area and excited to see how the model uses its statement understanding to produce code and guide its random exploration to create solutions.”

DeepMind has released its dataset of competitive programming problems and solutions on GitHub to help others build on their results.

Ian Funnell, Manager of Developer Relations at Matillion, said:

“Advancements like AlphaCode are welcomed and represent huge progress in designing algorithms more effectively. AI coding in general empowers developers to pursue innovation and creativity in setting the parameters and goals, leaving the AI to actually execute them.

Ultimately, this is a catalyst for innovation—helping humans rather than replacing them. Developers are extremely capable individuals, and businesses will continue to count on them to reap valuable insights from their data to differentiate and compete.”

DeepMind has set up an interactive site to view some of AlphaCode’s solutions and dive into the model at alphacode.deepmind.com.

(Image Credit: DeepMind)

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Copilot draws context from the code that a developer is working on and can suggest entire lines or functions. The system, from OpenAI, claims to be “significantly more capable than GPT-3” in generating code and can help even veteran programmers to discover new APIs or ways to solve problems.

Critics claim the system is using copyrighted code that GitHub then plans to charge for:

Julia Reda, a researcher and former MEP, published a blog post arguing that “GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright”.

GitHub – and therefore its owner, Microsoft – is using the huge number of repositories it hosts with ‘copyleft’ licenses for its tool. Copyleft allows open-source software or documentation to be modified and distributed back to the community.

Reda argues in her post that clamping down on tools such as GitHub’s through tighter copyright laws would harm copyleft and the benefits it offers.

One commenter isn’t entirely convinced:

“Lots of people have demonstrated that it pretty much regurgitates code verbatim from codebases with abandon. Putting GPL code inside a neural network does not remove the license if the output is the same as the input.

A large portion of what Copilot outputs is already full of copyright/license violations, even without extensions.”

Because the code is machine-generated, Reda also claims that it cannot be determined to be ‘derivative work’ that would face the wrath of intellectual property laws.

“Copyright law has only ever applied to intellectual creations – where there is no creator, there is no work,” says Reda. “This means that machine-generated code like that of GitHub Copilot is not a work under copyright law at all, so it is not a derivative work either.”

There is, of course, also a debate over whether the increasing amounts of machine-generated work should be covered under IP laws. We’ll let you decide your own position on the matter.

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GitHub Copilot uses an AI system from OpenAI known as OpenAI Codex. The system claims to have a broad knowledge of how people use code and claims to be “significantly more capable than GPT-3” in generating code.

By drawing context from the code that a developer is working on, the system is able to suggest entire lines or functions.

Even veteran coders can benefit from GitHub Copilot by using the system to explore new APIs and discover alternative ways to solve problems without having to scour the web for answers.

GitHub Pilot supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks but the company says the technical preview works best with Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, and Go.

There are currently only a limited number of spots available for the technical preview.

Find out more about GitHub Copilot and how to get started here.

Find out more about Digital Transformation Week North America, taking place on November 9-10 2021, a virtual event and conference exploring advanced DTX strategies for a ‘digital everything’ world.

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Project CodeNet was announced at IBM’s Think conference this week and claims to be the largest open-source dataset for code (approximately 10 times the size of the closest.)

CodeNet features 500 million lines of code, 14 million examples, and spans 55 programming languages including Python, C++, Java, Go, COBOL, Pascal, and more.

Projects such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are showing how AIs are becoming quite adept at penning the languages of us humans, but writing their own native code has been left to us. CodeNet aims to change that.

For at least the foreseeable future, projects like GPT-3 will be a tool for humans that can increase their productivity by providing a basic standard that will still require some editing to iron out errors and compensate for areas where humans still have an edge such as creativity, emotion, and compassion.

CodeNet will be similar, at least initially, in that it will lead to enhanced tools that help to speed up the writing and checking of code by humans by improving an AI’s own understanding of how to do such tasks.

“Given its wealth of programs written in a multitude of languages, we believe Project CodeNet can serve as a benchmark dataset for source-to-source translation and do for AI and code what the ImageNet dataset did years ago for computer vision,” says IBM.

US entrepreneur Marc Andreesen famously, and correctly, wrote in 2011 that “Software is eating the world”. Fast-forward to today and even cars now feature over 100 million lines of code (and growing rapidly, with the advent of autonomous vehicles.)

IBM says one of its large automotive clients recently approached the company to help update a $200 million asset consisting of 3,500, multi-generation Java files. These files contained over one million lines of code.

By applying its AI for Code stack, IBM reduced the client’s year-long ongoing code migration process down to just four weeks.

That example is sure to be the first of many in the years to come which have been greatly sped up, and improved, thanks to Project CodeNet.

You can find the full Project CodeNet dataset on GitHub here.

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The cloud-based solution aims to help accelerate the delivery of software in a rapidly-changing world while maintaining a high bar of quality.

Gareth Smith, CTO of Eggplant, said:

“The launch of our cloud platform is a significant milestone in our mission to rid the world of bad software. In our new normal, delivering speed and agility at scale has never been more critical.

Every business can easily tap into Eggplants’ AI-powered automation platform to accelerate the pace of delivery while ensuring a high-quality digital experience.” 

Enterprises have accelerated their shift to the cloud due to the pandemic and resulting increases in things such as home working.

Recent research from Centrify found that 51 percent of businesses which embraced a cloud-first model were able to handle the challenges presented by COVID-19 far more effectively.

Eggplant’s Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Platform features:

• Cloud-based end-to-end automation: The scalable fusion engine provides frictionless and efficient continuous and parallel end-to-end testing in the cloud, for any apps and websites, and on any target platforms. 
• Monitoring insights: The addition of advanced user experience (UX) data points and metrics, enables customers to benchmark their applications UX performance. These insights, added to the UX behaviour helps improve SEO. 
• Fully automated self-healing test assets: The use of AI identifies the tests needed and builds and runs them automatically, under full user control. These tests are self-healing, and automatically adapt as the system-under-test evolves.   

The solution helps to support the “citizen developer” movement—using AI to enable no-code/low-code development for people with minimal programming knowledge.

Both cloud and AI ranked highly in a recent study (PDF) by Deloitte of the most relevant technologies “to operate in the new normal”. Cloud and cybersecurity were joint first with 80 percent of respondents, followed by cognitive and AI tools (73%) and the IoT (65%).

Eggplant’s combination of AI and cloud technologies should help businesses to deal with COVID-19’s unique challenges and beyond.

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DeepCode’s machine learning-based bot is fluent in JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, C/C++, and Python.

“Our data shows that over 50% of repositories have critical issues and every second pull-request has warnings about issues that need to be fixed,” said Boris Paskalev, CEO and co-founder of DeepCode.

“By using DeepCode, these issues are automatically identified and logically explained as suggestions are made about how to fix them before code is deployed.”

Over the past few months, DeepCode has focused on improving the JavaScript skills of the bot. JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as Vue.js and React are supported. A demo of DeepCode’s analysis of React can be found here.

DeepCode claims its bot is now “up to 50x faster and finding more than double the number of serious bugs over all other tools combined while maintaining over 80% accuracy.”

The bot has been trained using machine learning to analyse hundreds of millions of commits across the vast number of open source projects freely available. DeepCode says it’s able to identify bugs before they happen.

A recent survey by DeepCode found that 85 percent of people want software companies to focus less on new features and more on fixing bugs and security issues.

“Too many software companies still believe that new features are what users want the most,” commented Paskalev. “As this survey shows, what people really want is quality software that is safe to use.”

DeepCode is free for open source software and commercial teams of up to 30 developers. You can start analysing your code by connecting your GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab account here.

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