‘Co-crafting code: Changing nature of work at the intersection of programmers and artificial intelligence’ is my ongoing research project, funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation (2025–2027).
What I’m Studying
How do software developers work with AI coding assistants, and how is that changing what it means to be a programmer?
I’m doing ethnographic fieldwork in two very different settings:
Moodle – a large, globally distributed open-source project with over a thousand contributors
Company E – a small Helsinki-based software company building custom web solutions
By comparing these two contexts, I can see how organizational culture shapes AI adoption, and how AI adoption in turn reshapes work practices.
Research Questions
How does human-AI interaction change software development practices?
How do existing workplace genres of communication (code reviews, documentation, types of code) shape AI tool adoption – and how are those genres changing as a result?
What are the social consequences of these changes, for workplace hierarchies and beyond?
Why This Matters
Software developers are at the vanguard of AI’s transformation of knowledge work. What happens to them – new skills, new frustrations, new hierarchies – will likely spread to other professions.
I’m particularly interested in how established genres of workplace communication get disrupted.
Methods
Long-term ethnographic fieldwork (in-person and online)
Participating in code reviews, team meetings, daily work, code jams, etc.
Interviews with developers
Digital ethnography in the communication tools developers already use
Timeline
2025: Fieldwork
2026: Writing and first publications
2027: Publishing a monograph on the research
Outputs
- I’ll add research outputs here as they are published.