AI is coming for us developers. Are you ready for it?

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I have been vibe coding in my spare time lately and managed to create and publish an iOS app called SnoreBuzzer within 2(!) days. Do I have knowledge of the underlying Swift programming language? Zero. I created the app solely by prompting and focusing on the functional specification. OpenAI Codex did the heavy lifting: code generation, improving code quality, and documentation (incl. generating a data privacy statement). I specified my intent and tested the outcome. As a developer, I still kept an eye on the code to make sure it did not end up in a mess, so understanding the code is still required, but you definitely do not need to write it yourself anymore. As I let Codex make changes to my code, I regularly checked in to Git so I could easily revert changes if Codex messed things up, but that happened for only 5% of my prompts.

Now to the big picture of this: a new age for developers is rising. In a couple of years, every developer will be using prompts for most of his development. It does not matter if you are into Swift, Oracle APEX, Python, Java, C#, or whatever, AI will dramatically change the way we work. Does this mean we do not need people with good coding skills anymore? Wrong. As developers, we are still responsible for our code, so we always need to be in control.

Low-code platforms like Oracle APEX have a clear advantage in this AI era, as the LLM will generate the metadata for the app out of your functional specification, not the actual code itself. As the low-code platform vendor is in charge of the underlying code, you can rely on it to be secure, scalable, state-of-the-art, etc.

My dear friend Jon Dixon recognized this change as well and wrote a great blog post about its impact on PL/SQL and APEX developers: https://blog.cloudnueva.com/an-ai-shift-for-apex-developers (Jon, excellent work, I couldn't agree more!)

Happy prompting.

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