AI coding assistance is surprisingly changing the way developers and integrators work, and it raises some interesting questions about what will happen in the coming years — maybe over the next 2–5 years.
AI can already help with a lot of the development work involved in Ignition: scripting, Perspective, SQL, React/TypeScript, custom components, and even more complex development tasks.
As these tools continue to improve, how will this affect the role of an Ignition developer or integrator?
Will development skills become less important, while things like domain knowledge, system architecture, OT/IT integration, commissioning, troubleshooting, cybersecurity, and understanding the customer's process become more important?
And what happens to the traditional business model of an integrator when development work can be done much faster with AI assistance?
I'm curious how other developers and integrators see this.
Has AI already changed the way you work, and what do you think will become more important for an Ignition developer or integrator in the coming years?
The AI tools will speed up development on some things and people who crutch on it too much will probably have terrible and embarrassing experiences periodically.
AI will probably let you faceroll your way through a greenfield project for large systems that have a lot of similar equipment built on the same standard with modern technology (like a data center and things like that) because scale isn't a problem for AI.
I don't think it will do well in a lot of SCADA migrations. It will get better over time but I think there will be a gap for a while.
Some of the systems I migrate predate the internet. AI won't have access to good information on how to migrate those. I'm sure some people's solution to that will be to just rebuild the whole system. Those systems didn't get that old because the customer operates like that.
I haven't seen AI do a good job of building P&ID type screens either. I've seen examples where P&IDs were built automatically and they were not impressive to me and certainly wouldn't be impressive to most of my customers. I've heard a sentiment that you don't need P&ID screens and that is probably true in some industries but I don't believe that is generally true which is why I keep making resources for building them for other people to use. Also, having auto-generated P&IDs that look worse than the original screens is not perceived as an improvement to a lot of customers. I believe the solution to migrating old systems into Ignition involves doing the work.
My experience is that customers usually want P&IDs if they already have them and they want them to look at least as good as the old ones and function similarly to the existing screens because they don't want to have to retrain all their operators.
The integrated AI tools to streamline writing expressions and stuff like that will probably be significant time savers. The AI tool on the help site is fantastic.
Ultimately, I think it's important to be able to do the work and it's really important to validate any work you automated. The AI empowered search tools will allow people to do great development and troubleshooting with less tribal knowledge in much the same way that internet search has allowed people to build better things.
I don't believe there is a substitute for knowing what you're doing.