The appearance of the AI pair programmer

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Editor's note: Earlier this month, Alphabet-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind announced that it has created a system called AlphaCode that can code just as well as an average human programmer. AlphaCode was tested in a coding competition and marked the first time an AI code generation system reached a competitive level of performance in programming competitions. It is an impressive technical achievement, but DeepMind is far from the only tech company developing AI-powered tools that can write their own code. Across the world of enterprise tech, developer experience is a key focus area. The pitch is that smart developers can focus on building solutions more if the coding effort is reduced. Google, for example, is all in on AutoML that helps automate the tasks of applying machine learning to real-world problems. The high degree of automation in AutoML aims to allow non-experts to make use of machine learning models and techniques without any expertise in the area. And last year, Amazon introduced Amazon SageMaker Canvas, a visual, no-code interface to build accurate machine learning models—although, it’s more focused on business analysts and …