From Code to Contracts: How AI is Transforming the Way We Learn and Work

I was reading an article on Spectrum over the weekend called "AI Copilots are changing how coding is taught." As a tl;dr, it covers how AI is helping streamline development processes and how it's helping teach more complex concepts, allowing students to spend more time on ethical considerations, user experience, and overall optimisation.

It's a really interesting point because it fundamentally changes the type of developers we'll start to see come through. A lot of my early learning came from the sheer brute force of dealing with lots of legacy code, making sense of it, trying to find the problems, and solving them. I'd then apply those learnings, either consciously or subconsciously, to all the work that followed.

If we abstract away the sheer number of hours of exposure to code over the years as a way of learning, then it feels like the role of a developer really needs to change. It has been moving away from "developer just writes code" (which hasn't been the case for a long time) and towards a deeper integration with the customers for whom they build software.

This will also end up being the case for legal and legal tech, regardless of your opinion on how much or how little AI should be involved in the day-to-day workings of the legal profession. It'll be interesting to see how the legal profession, especially at the very early learning stages (say A Levels), will adapt. If the tasks that immersed you in contracts, where you gained knowledge beyond just the task at hand, are removed, where do you get that same knowledge?

Ultimately, this falls back to the constant change we see in every sector. Previously, I had to configure a web server correctly to host an app; a lot of that is now abstracted away from me. However, now I have to write deployment scripts. The fundamental task has changed, and I've adapted to the new task. It'll be interesting to hear people's thoughts on how gaining knowledge will change in the legal profession.