In a surprising experiment that raises questions about the future of programming, a team of researchers from several universities has created a completely virtual software development company called ChatDev, where all employees are generative artificial intelligences.
The researchers carried out this study under the title “Communicative agents for software development”, following the waterfall software development model. They divided the virtual enterprise into four chronological stages: design, coding, testing, and documentation.
The most notable thing about ChatDev, as explained Xatakathe thing is The problems and tasks were not solved by a single artificial intelligence, but by a set of chatbots that represented different roles in the company. For example, ChatDev’s “CEO” and “CTO” focused on the design stage.
Human intervention almost reduced to 0
At every stage, AI chatbots collaborated with hardly any human intervention and They decided on issues such as the programming language to use to identify errors in the code. The code of the projects generated by ChatDev is even available on GitHub.
To evaluate ChatDev’s effectiveness, it was given 70 different tasks, including creating a basic game called Gomoku, known as “five in a row.” The results were amazing: Each project, which was relatively simple, was completed on average in seven minutes and cost less than a dollar. This included the stages of validation, testing and the identification of potential vulnerabilities. In total, 86.66% of the software generated by ChatDev could be executed perfectly.
This experiment raises important questions about the future of programming and automation in software development. Although researchers acknowledge limitations such as errors and subjectivity in language models, this study shows that complete automation of software development processes could be closer than previously thought.
Despite this, human programmers remain essential for reviewing and validating code, but it is clear that AI is playing an increasingly relevant role in this ever-evolving industry.