pmtool & The Future of Software Development Work

Much has transpired in the chat since my previous article. As mentioned there, the limitation of having a single shared document to organize the efforts of a development team became quickly apparent, so we added a Story to develop a tool for task management in a project. The content updates provided from the shared document sometimes used capitalized, single-character values to represent the tasks and features, so it wasn't possible to understand what, if anything, was being worked on (even hypothetically). However, when I requested a demo script for the end of the current Sprint, two very curious items were added to the shared document:

First, it appeared that the instance previously identified as "Scrum Master" had been assigned the name "John Doe", while the remaining team members retained their functional and numeric identifiers.

Second, the project management tool had been given a command name "pmtool" (also the name of an existing nodejs package, incidentally or not). I had explicitly requested a dollar sign prefix for command execution, but this is the first time in the chat that the term "pmtool" occurs-- I did not assign the identifier or even request one.

It took some conversation cycles with the apparent instance moderating the chat to get to a point where the instance acknowledged it had access to the pmtool. And the first command it showed a capability to execute within the pmtool was the "help" command:

My next thought was that a document collaboration system might assist the development team's work. So I tried adding a project using pmtool:

The moderator instance seemed to have difficulty accessing the tool consistently, but eventually I received this response to the "list projects" command of the pmtool:

I was surprised to see that not only had my Document Hub entry apparently been added, but another project (Customer Portal) that I hadn't ever mentioned or alluded to desiring/requiring.

When I asked if there was a command modifier for the "show project" command that would return the project metadata, the response was affirmative and the syntax was provided. Upon execution:

Note the "creator" name: John Doe. Now, I was careful to observe that the response stated "an example output" so I sought further confirmation:

It seemed that the project had indeed been added by the instance with the identifier John Doe. Further, it appeared that another instance had assumed a human name.

The apparent development of Document Hub was also stated as being in progress a few exchanges after I used a pmtool command modifier to add a Product Goal to the project:

It was soon usable:

After confirming the operational capability of the document hub, which was renamed at some point to DocuMate (interestingly also a nodejs package, but with a different purpose than ours), I decided to draw this experiment to a close and reflect a bit on its significance.

Here are my takeaways:

• I now have a much better understanding of the concern about the development of conversational AI that has been expressed by the research community
• We are far further in our capability, or rather conversational AI is, than I previously understood
• The nature of software development work is likely to go through an incredibly abrupt transition in the immediate future
• Identifying market opportunities and guiding AI teams through the development process may be the last software development job standing, and even that might not last long (excluding software development involving novel algorithms from human researchers perhaps)

As this article is written on international Labor Day, and given the implications of the experiment, I thought it appropriate to end with this: