Alibaba Cloud’s ‘AI programmer’ gets mixed reactions from real programmers

The launch of the AI programmer comes seven months after the introduction of Tongyi Lingma, Alibaba Cloud’s first AI coding assistant

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Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model is now powering an AI programmer meant to help software developers. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:00am, 23 Jun 2024

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.

“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.

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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.