Alibaba Cloud's 'AI programmer' gets mixed reactions from real programmers

Alibaba Group Holding's cloud unit has introduced its first "AI programmer" powered by the company's self-developed large language model (LLM), as the tech giant explores monetisation of the business.

Introduced by Alibaba Cloud, the AI programmer aims to help developers shorten development time for applications, in some cases down to minutes, the company said in a statement on Friday. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

Functioning as a "multi-intelligence agent", the AI programmer combines the roles of software architect, development engineer, and test engineer to achieve end-to-end product functionality, according to the statement.

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"The development paradigm for software applications is changing," Xu Dong, general manager of Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Qianwen LLM service, said at the company's Cloud AI summit in Shanghai on Friday.

"In the future, users only need to identify problems and express requirements, and completing an application development in minutes will become the norm," Xu said.

Alibaba Cloud said the AI programmer could handle tasks such as decomposition, code writing, testing and debugging, deployed all at once through multiple conversations with the user.

During a live demonstration at the summit, the AI programmer created an application from scratch within 10 minutes, a process the company said might take half a day using traditional methods.

Human programmers, however, have expressed mixed feelings about the product. Liang Yan, a developer who has worked in the cryptocurrency industry for four years, said the AI programmer might be a threat.

"My job is mainly about choosing open source projects and learning from them," said Liang. "It's not only about meeting the requirements, but it's also a way to understand the programme."

Although the AI programmer may save time in development, it may prevent programmers from understanding what they are doing, according to Liang. It also reduces opportunities for novice programmers, he said.

Yang Yi, a developer working for a Chinese Big Tech company who has tried other coding tools similar AI programmer, said these tools are still in an early stage of development.

"I asked AI to write specific code, but it generated code that was not so reliable, sometimes with grammatical or factual errors," Yang said. "It reduces the workload, but not completely."

The launch of the AI programmer comes seven months after the introduction of Tongyi Lingma, Alibaba Cloud's first AI coding assistant, which is also powered by Tongyi Qianwen.

Trained on open-source code, Tongyi Lingma is able to generate code based on natural language instructions, run unit tests, and debug and optimise code.

The basic version of Tongyi Lingma is free for individual users, while the corporate version - with additional management features - is available for a monthly fee of 159 yuan (US$22) per person with a minimum of 100 users.

The newly introduced AI programmer, which targets both individual and corporate developers, is not yet publicly available. Pricing details have not been disclosed, according to the company.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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