Generative-AI Adoption Toolkit

This Generative-AI Adoption Toolkit is meant to answer an important question for today’s technology leaders: How can I help my team adopt AI-assisted coding tools and practices in a human-centered and evidence-based way?

This question may never be more salient – and the stakes may never be higher – than at this moment. New research from the Developer Success Lab looks at the sociocognitive factors that predict how software engineers engage, adapt, and thrive during this transition to AI-assisted software work. This research unveils a new evidence-based framework for helping developers, engineering managers, and leaders as they grapple with the human side of the transition: AI Skill Threat.

AI Skill Threat occurs when developers fear that those skills that have contributed to their success as code writers may become obsolete, thus threatening their identities as software practitioners. In our research, 45% of developers showed evidence of worry, anxiety and fear about whether they could succeed in this era with their current technical skill set. And yet, we also found that developers are poised and eager to address the threat they’re feeling, with 74% of developers reporting that they plan to actively upskill in AI-assisted coding tools and technologies.

This Generative-AI Adoption Toolkit enables engineering leaders to seize on this tidal wave of change in a way that keeps developers front of mind, by tackling AI Skill Threat head-on. It contains evidence-based, human-centered resources to help you put our  research-backed  Developer Thriving Framework into practice. 

The components of this toolkit represent adaptations of well-known software ceremonies: post-mortems and hackathons. Learning, belonging, collaboration, and community are already built into these long-practiced ceremonies. Our research has found that two key elements in the Developer Thriving framework – learning cultures and sense of belonging – strengthen developers’ resilience as they transition to AI-assisted software development. In this toolkit, we’ll guide you through increasing learning and belonging on your teams, and give you detailed plans, rationales and scripts to confidently lead these experiences. 

These resources have been piloted with our own teams at Pluralsight, and are available to you to clone and adapt however you need for your context and teams. Whether you’re a front-line manager, a Director or VP of Engineering, a Transformation Engineer, or a Chief Technology Officer, we designed this Generative-AI Adoption Toolkit to provide an entrypoint for uncovering, addressing, and mitigating your developers’ AI Skill Threat. 

Mitigating AI Skill Threat requires that we value the human knowledge work of software development in new ways, using AI-assisted tools not to replace, but to empower developers. Our sincere hope for this toolkit is that it helps developers, leaders, and organizations move toward productively adopting AI-assisted coding, while centering the human needs, intellectual capital, and high performance of engineering teams.

In sum, we hope this toolkit helps you and your teams absolutely thrive during this exciting moment in time!