How Kitestring Accelerates Software Development Projects with AI

Amid all the buzz surrounding AI, your organization is likely looking for ways to harness the technology to streamline operations. This impulse can be especially strong if you face a pressing need to modernize a legacy system, which requires a sizable investment of time and effort by skilled software developers.  

Can AI close the gap in your engineering resources? The short answer is: Yes and no. 

In our experience, Kitestring has found that AI is teaching us how to get the most from its capabilities while helping our teams explore new creative ideas. But in every application we’ve used, it still requires a human in the loop to provide oversight. 

Just as critically, AI requires the assistance of an experienced engineer to enhance software development. With the addition of an expert human perspective, this cutting-edge technology can help your organization reach its development goals.

 

The Limits of AI in Leveling-Up Development Talent

Incorporating AI into your organization’s process requires a top-down strategy to be successful. The technology has great potential to enhance a discipline like coding, but  it demands specific guardrails in place to be effectively applied by your teams.

You need to navigate the risks inherent in how AI uses data and its related concerns about ethics, security, and compliance. Plus, you need to understand the inherent limits of the technology and what it can deliver. 

Experience is Essential to Harnessing the Power of AI

AI can write plenty of code. But if you have no understanding of software, you’re not going to get very far testing why that code did or didn’t work. No layperson without a background in development will be successfully programming software in the span of a few queries to ChatGPT. 

Of course, while you can’t point AI at your current POS platform or other system and ask it to create a modern version, it can be used to enhance your thinking. AI can likely help you break down some of the key features and offer assistance from a project management standpoint. 

AI is also a useful approach for writing some unit testing for a specific function to verify it works as expected. Or you can use it to debug a small function in your software. But you have to focus the technology toward the right results to ensure it produces the specific outcomes you need.

 

How Kitestring Uses AI to Enhance Software Development

AI consistently needs an experienced hand to monitor it and ask the right questions. Kitestring has begun using it in a way that’s balanced with our specific expertise in developing complex software to solve specific problems.

In our conversations with clients, the response to AI has run the gamut. Some hope it’s an all-in-one solution to every problem, while others remain hands-off about its use to avoid any potential risk. The right approach for most businesses is likely somewhere in the middle. Kitestring has already explored a few ways AI enhances our productivity and the way our developers work.

Tackling Boilerplate Software Development

The technology is also useful as far as helping enhance current development by taking on repetitive tasks. For example, in some of our recent work modernizing an existing piece of software for a company’s yard management system. A set of features needed to be recreated from the previous system, and we could see that some elements of code already existed. With the right oversight, AI could provide a way to take some remedial coding tasks off the shoulders of our experienced developers.

When a system already exists, and you know it needs certain types of features, AI can help provide some boilerplate code we already know. However, you still have to test and verify everything AI creates and still create the complicated code required for the core aspects of the system. The technology isn’t mature enough to update and replace code on its own.

Researching Project Parameters

Even when you apply AI as a research assistant for something like a jobs-to-be-done analysis on a POS project, it’s likely to go on tangents or explore areas that are inappropriate for the project. Or, it can also uncover an idea you hadn’t considered.

You have to have the experience to recognize the results to disregard and the ones that may branch into areas that are worth further investigation. If you lack the expertise in software development and UX research, AI will easily take you in the wrong direction — and that can be dangerous.

Learning New Frameworks

AI simply isn’t skilled or mature enough to replace an expert software developer. But it can enable an experienced developer to gain a footing with new software languages and approaches to coding.

In some of our recent client work, a client used a very specific, niche code framework to write their software. We used AI to help us understand the style of coding, and it helped break down some of the concepts so we could write code in that style.

Again, we used AI to break down specific ideas, but the technology doing so for an engineer who is very skilled. By tapping into our deep level of experience, we could use AI to accelerate our process, identify the right code, and apply a specific business logic to what AI produced. 

 

Why the Human Element Remains Essential to AI 

In our experience, AI is not necessarily helpful to a junior developer who isn’t already well-versed in software engineering. However, in the right hands, it’s helped us expand our skills in new directions. 

AI is accelerating our work, and it’s making us more productive. But it’s not going to wholesale write the software you need without oversight. You need an experienced human to send it down the right path and ask the right questions. At the same time, you have to understand your stakeholders’ needs to see effective results. 

If you’re aiming to use AI to help streamline your software project or modernize your existing system, Kitestring can help. We’re experts not only in developing the right solutions, we also know how to incorporate the efficiency gains of AI in a useful and impactful way.