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When I tell people I’m a software developer working on Bible translation software, most people inevitably ask, “How is AI affecting what you do?”
I was a bit apprehensive about using AI at first, but I’ve come to see it as a valuable tool for saving time and reducing repetitive work. Throughout my career, I’ve seen tools evolve to take care of more of the tedious details of writing software, allowing developers to focus on solving problems.
When I started as a software developer, we used plain text editors. I had to be careful to get the code right, and I did much of the work myself. Over time, editors became more sophisticated. They learned to recognize the programming language I was using and could help me work with the functions and libraries available. I still had to research which libraries to use and figure out how to use them, but these tools made the job easier. The changes came gradually, each one helping me work a little more efficiently.
Each of these changes made me a little more productive, but AI feels different. Rather than simply helping me write code more efficiently, it allows me to hand off tasks that I would previously have had to figure out and do myself. It opens up new possibilities for how I approach my work.
My work involves much more than just writing code. Because we have a small team, I wear many hats—taking on tasks that might be handled by several different people on a larger team. AI gives me a way to delegate some of the more routine work so I can focus on solving the problems that matter most to our mission of making Scripture available to people in their own languages.
Here’s one example.
Whenever we release a new version of our software, we have a series of steps to complete for each platform we support: Windows, macOS, and Linux. Two summers ago, we had a student project to revamp how we package our Linux software for distribution through Flathub, making it possible to run on a wide range of Linux distributions. The new approach worked, but releasing updates still involved quite a few manual steps.
While preparing our 14.7 release this week, I decided to describe the existing process to Claude, an AI assistant, and asked how I could improve it. Within an hour, I had an automated workflow that detects changes to our source code and creates new Linux installers when a release is tagged.
That’s a big improvement! What had been a manual process is now automated, saving time with each release. Just as importantly, the process is no longer dependent on me being available. Other members of the team can handle releases without having to learn all the details of the packaging process.
This is just one example of how AI is becoming part of our day-to-day work. It helps us spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time building and improving the tools that support Bible translation.
In future articles, I’ll share more examples of how AI is helping us write software and how we are using it within the Scripture apps.
