AI to replace Salesforce Developers

Special Announcement - 01st April 2017

Artificial Intelligence will soon start cranking Apex, Visualforce, and JavaScript code - an anonymous source in the Salesforce R&D team has confirmed.

The demo, that was exclusively shown in a private event to some human developers like me, was mind blowing to say the least. We were told that the code written by AI was demonstrably bug free, elegant and maintainable by a factor of 10. Their comments in the code were more descriptive, and in almost all cases, relevant and to the point. The variable names however were quite odd; some of them were just a string of weird emojis. The reason for this, according to the (human) AI researcher, was that the variable name and the code doesn't have to be human readable anymore. It just has to make sense to the machine.

When I asked to look at the documentation related to the code, the researcher coyly said, they were unable to persuade/program the AI to write supporting documentation. I guess there are some things even the AI thinks are a waste of time (in this case CPU cycles).

Project managers have received this news with great enthusiasm stating that they no longer have to feel that their primary job is to herd cats. They have asked how soon can this AI start clearing their backlog without arguing all day about story points, or blaming the users for everything.

Recruiters had mixed feelings about this "innovation". Whilst they were happy about the fact that they don't have to go to the ends of the earth to find a decent Salesforce developer or deal with prima donnas, they were worried the AI would probably work for free robbing them of their commission.

After hearing this announcement, despondent Salesforce developers have started considering alternate careers like farming, becoming unhappy users of software written by AI, and some are also considering picking up Azure skills (gasp!).