AI should assist in generating and maintaining documentation, specifically to aid in onboarding new team members and to help developers recall details about code they worked on previously.
In all the hype about AI-assisted programming people are missing the importance of iteration speed. Many years ago I started a company called Electric Cloud whose goal was to remove the bottleneck of the software compilation process. Sounds technical and weird, right? Sure, but if you remove a bottleneck to getting to running code you get to use the software sooner and get feedback and change it faster. It's really hard to get a product "right" the first time. In fact, it's impossible because "right" changes the moment you or your customer sees the product. As soon as you build something you understand extra things you can build. Improvements. Enhancements. New functionality. It's tempting to think you can specify everything up front but many years ago companies and developers drowned using the waterfall method to try to do that (and predict a perfect ship date). Doesn't work. We've spent decades proving that. What does work is fast iteration. And AI-assisted programming is really fast. The faster you can iterate and get feedback into the product, the happier users will be. The future is fast feedback. Let's go.