Will AI 'eat software' - and what'll happen to coders? w/ Thomas Dohmke

3 years ago a helicopter took off on Mars NASA's Ingenuity robot it was the first time humans made a machine to take flight on another planet the Ingenuity is nothing like a regular helicopter it's a tiny spindly looking thing that weighs Just 4 lbs and its first flight was not very dramatic you can watch a video online Ingenuity goes up to about like 10 ft and then immediately settles back down this is the first time NASA showed it was even possible to fly in a super thin atmosphere like Mars but NASA didn't make this happen alone about 12,000 volunteer coders helped create the very software that Ingenuity runs on and here's the strange thing most of them didn't even know they were working on this project so how's this possible well they were sharing their code on GitHub if you're not a coder and don't know anything about GitHub it's pretty simple GitHub is just a website where people upload their code and share it that's it but the thing is it's massive there are over a 100 million developers on GitHub so when NASA was looking for code to run their Ingenuity robot they found a bunch already on there perfectly suited for the task at hand in 2018 Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion but GitHub continues to operate independently without giving up its open source Roots it's a place where you have a bunch of people just giving out their code for free for anyone to use or build on in order to make software they think is cool or useful GitHub volunteers have worked on some incredible open- Source projects like the operating system Linux and tensorflow the Machine learning framework and even software that helped track covid-19 cases at the start of the pandemic and now GitHub is undergoing a radical transformation it's inviting AI to take over a lot of the coding while a lot of us worry about AI coming for our jobs companies always promote AI as an augmentation not a replacement but how will this shake out for coders will AI just help them build that cool new app in a day or will it eventually replace them in other words will AI be the co-pilot or the captain I'm belaval sadu and this is the tedi show where we figure out how to live and thrive in a world where AI is changing everything over a decade ago the entrepreneur inventure capitalist Mark Andre announced that software is eating the world he argued that software was becoming fundamental to society and that software companies were basically going to disrupt every industry possible and he wasn't wrong well back in January Thomas d built on that prophecy he told a wired reporter quote software has eaten the world and now it's ai's turn AI is eating software end quote and he sounded pretty enthusiastic about it it's an interesting perspective for him to take as the CEO of GitHub because GitHub is built upon human contributed software and for well over a decade it's been the center of the programming Universe github's plan isn't to totally replace coders but inad dead to give them superpowers in 2021 GitHub introduced something called co-pilot back then it was running on codex open ai's programming model and when they conducted surveys with these early co-pilot users coder said they were not only more productive but they were having a better time too suddenly coding was less frustrating and more fulfilling but co-pilots only gotten more powerful since then it now runs on GPT 4 and it's doing a lot more than autocomplete right now Thomas says a whopping 50% of the code on GitHub is being written by Ai and soon he thinks it'll be more like 80% in other words AI is eating software I sat down with Thomas dumka a few weeks ago to talk about where this All Leads tell us about what got you interested in technology and software development in the first place I grew up in East berin when Germany was still divided into two countries and I was you know maybe 9 8 n years old in the the late ' 80s and I saw um I saw a computer in a in a shopping window I couldn't buy it but I saw this computer and it was clear to me I want to touch this and I want to you know use the keyboard to type something and so as soon as the wallf fell in the late ' 80s and Germany got reunited and you get West German money instead of East German money I went to the supermarket and bought a Commodore 64 and and started coding on that and you know it's easy to forget what that was like back then you had to buy books and magazines and manuals ultimately to learn coding and so I worked myself through that process you know and got frustrated at night and then you go to bed and hope that in the morning you have like a magical idea of how to solve a problem so coding can be a pretty solitary activity like the internet came about and in the '90s people started exchanging software on the internet right but collaboration was still pretty clunky and difficult like we had forums IRC all these online communities started popping up but there's still no real place for folks to collaborate together especially folks from around the world how did GitHub come into existence in this context yeah I I would probably push back a little bit on that definition You could argue that you know in the '90s uh the open source scene or the software scene was the first real Creator Community long before we had you know YouTube and and Tik Tok and so those were mostly nerds software developers you know hacking stuff and and whatnot as you know the internet became more popular and we got the browser and um soon enough you got some form of a forum and in the early days there was a platform called Source Forge which was kind of like the first home of Open Source in 2007 the founders of GitHub launched very fast and uh built that Paradigm that that we still have on gith up today which is you can push your sauce code and you can share with others and it started as open source and you know here we are uh 16 years later um uh and K up being kind of like the center of the software universe very much so yeah it is the epicenter of the software Universe you know people are building and collaborating together um ENT generative AI right in 2021 GitHub introduced something called co-pilot AI that helps you write your code if you're familiar with autocomplete it's a lot like that because it turns out programming is a really a ton of boilerplate and is fairly predictable so you write a couple lines of code and then what co-pilot does is basically autocomplete that code for you it'll add the next line or the next few lines it keeps predicting what you're going for and essentially eliminates a ton of that drudgery for developers the really mundane repetitive stuff and lets them stay focused on the higher level task at hand and you know when you when you start with an empty file obviously the first line is um less predictable um than when you have already written 50 lines of code and the more you write the more it becomes predictable uh what you're writing next but is a co-pilot um you are still in charge and the developer still needs to set the direction of where the plane is going so obviously now everyone's talking about AI uh but co-pilot has been around for a few years well before we were talking about chat GPT so where did the idea for co-pilot first come from so for us it all started during covid um it was June um 2020 we were all on a video call together and we had just gotten Early Access to open I large language model and you know somebody on the call had the keyboard and everybody else was just shouting or telling that person what to type and so we had the idea okay let's start with some programming exercises like typical things that you know computer science students or employes would do when they apply for a new job and um it worked surprisingly well to the degree that I think many of us on the call were like holy you know that it can actually put the parenthesis in the right place and it knows that you know JavaScript which is one programming language has a different syntax than than python it could differentiate between the two and wouldn't gobble them together into broken code and um so we ended the call at some point and sent one of our teams uh to investigate that further and they collected 200 or so programming exercises and uh got the model to a point where it would solve 93% of those in a few shots and and that was the point where we like this is we have something here we can actually build a product out of this what worked really well was um text to code as in you write something in your editor and it predicts the next word or it takes a comment or multiple clients of comment to to write a code for you so we started building that product which became the original co-pilot in June 2021 and then the product went publicly available a year later in June 2022 so even that was was still before uh chpt even existed which was November 2022 what was the response from the development Community like when this first came out disbelief I think most people were like this will not work and we saw you know lots of tweets um at the time when people got through that initial disbelief and we like okay I was wrong and it actually is useful to me and it actually can help me writing code and I think a big part of that reason is that um similar to when you write a blog post when you write code um you know you're always going to get to the point where you have to look something up switch from your Editor to your browser and you know all our browsers look the same name and lots of tabs open kills the Flow State exactly it kills the Flow State I like to describe this as you know you're surfing you're falling off the surf board and now you have to paddle back get back on the board find a new wave and and and you can surf again and so having a Copart available to you that keeps you in that flow State even if it's a little bit wrong or maybe it didn't predict exactly what you wanted to write well you can just modify it exactly as you would have when you copy and paste it off the internet we done research that shows that developers are they're more on the Flow State and they need to do less of the work that they don't want to do boilerplate and have more time for the stuff that actually is fun so after we launched we realized there is an opportunity here to not only have autoc completion uh and predict the next word um because that that has a clear downside which is you can't really ask co-pilot questions and so we brought chat GPT into into the editor and and called that co-pilot chat uh and all of a sudden you can now ask questions in the same way that you can ask questions on chat gbt but it's in the context of the file they editing and so you can ask questions like what does that code do or find the problem with this code and it would basically give you an answer like chpd does I just want to jump in here and say that if you worked on collaborative coding projects or inherited somebody else's code base you know how helpful this would be like reading through someone else's code and figuring out how the heck it's working and how it fits together with everything else can often be super challenging so having an AI explain it to you would be major level up often you know the documentation the comments as we mentioned earlier are not good enough to completely understand how things work and so now you can highlight code and say explain this code to me um and you can do that in not only English but you can do it in German and Hindi and Brazilian Portuguese and French Spanish you know many most major human languages and that then means that you know if I'm a kiddo you know a six-year-old that wants to learn coding and I goow up in Germany or Mumbai um I don't have to learn English first I can just do that in the language that mom and dad taught me and start exploring my creativity that's super exciting because of co-pilot the number of software developers will increase exponentially right now GitHub has roughly 100 million users but you estimate that by 2030 GitHub could have 1 billion developers where does that number come from I think we announced 100 million over a year ago um so you can just you know apply math of what the grow rate is per year um compounded over the next 7 eight years and um exponential growth will tell you uh it's it's actually not that uh crazy of growth rate to get to a billion uh by 2030 it's about 10% of the world's population um and that's not too crazy if you think about you know basic skills that kids learn in school I think coding is a fundamental skill that kids should learn in school um because at six probably these days they already have a phone and they certainly had some kind of like access to computer and so I think if you teach kids in first grade and second grade the fundamentals of coding with the help of of co-pilot and other large language models if you show them things like sa diffusion or mid Journey they will explore their creativity so much more than they can do today and then naturally that leads to an explosion of people that have software development skills it doesn't mean they're all becoming professional software developers in the same way that just because you learned an instrument in in school doesn't mean you became a professional musician but it becomes a skill that is part of your repertoire as as a human and you use it whenever it makes you happy or serves a purpose for you I love that you're describing this world where coding is no longer going to be this super specialized skill set right so in the world you're predicting software creation starts to look a lot like content creation like the way we have millions of users uploading video Creations to YouTube Tik Tok Instagram Etc Um this can be great in some ways right like there's this democratization anyone can create it does seem one thing as clear right the amount of software is going to increase exponentially along with the developers so in in many ways it seems like the floor is rising but so is the ceiling to sort of break through and create the next big hit do you see the world that way the nice thing about software is that we need much more software than we consume videos every single day we live in a world where most companies actually build software um not only the tech companies that always constantly in our head your energy supplier has a software team your credit card is software and so you can keep going every company is now a software company and so they're all employing millions of software developers the demand for software developers is bigger than supply of computer science students um and as such you know we need more tools to manage that ever growing pile of software and the ever growing Demand on these software applications in our daily lives you know there's probably a lot of parents listening to this and it brings up the question of Education conventional wisdom was like if you want a futureproof profession learn software engineering software engineering is clearly changing so with the rise of sort of AI assisted coding what kind of skills should software developers you know be inculcating right how do you see the education landscape shifting to create the next generation of software developers I think creative thinking problem solving systems thinking like decomposing uh you know big problems into smaller problems and then figuring out at what point to I leverage an AI tool or code generator or an open source Library so I don't have to reinvent the wheel when you're building a house you know that you're not producing the tiles yourself and you're buying probably a sink and you have 10,000 options of sink available and the problem actually is exactly the same um as you have when you're building a house which is a it's a big project that takes much longer than you thought it would take you have a lot of decisions to make and that's true in software too there's thousands of databases and database schemas and you know Cloud Technologies and you can build apps in many different ways and so you need a software developer professional software developer that has the experience and the education to make those decisions and I think that's where you know education will still play a big role I think um another big role will be that teachers will change a bit of how they're teaching and they're going to show us how to use the AI and how to leverage the AI in a responsible way in a safe and secure way way in a way that you're not you're not creating harm I love the analogy of building houses like how absurd would it be if we said oh well we're not going to use all this Advanced Machinery like I'm not going to go bu that sink I'm going to start building everything from scratch and we now have a way to sort of eliminate a ton of the drudgery and have software developers focus on designing creating doing sort of the fun stuff well you know just because Home Depot is selling you um Power Tools uh doesn't mean that the job of a builder has gone away in fact try to find a professional contractor to do something on your house or or condo and you will have a challenge right like just just because those tools are available to the hobbyist to um to build something creative doesn't mean that there isn't the profession of the professional builder or the professional software going away we're going to take a short break when we come back is co-pilot simply going to augment coders or replace them all together I've been talking to Thomas dka CEO of GitHub about co-pilot their AI powered assistant for writing code copilot started off as a kind of autocomplete tool for coders now it's having conversations with us about code I don't know what's next but I know co-pilot is going to keep evolving and when it comes to the evolution of AI it seems like all roads lead to this question is there going to be a point where AI isn't just going to be a co-pilot but our captain that's the fear anyway so Thomas what do you think is that fear well founded I wouldn't say they're unfounded because that would you know diminish the research and opinions of others I think both of these polarities you know of the world where there is Agi and the world where AI is a companion and never gets to the point where it has you know sentience they can both exist in the same space and the question is time and how long it takes us to that point in time um I don't see us anywhere close if you ask my opinion I'd say I'm on the side of um AI is a companion and there's nothing in the current science and research that tells us we have found a way to recreate sentients but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen it's just you know today we're not at that point software development is clearly going to be democratized and we're going to have a lot more software Engineers uh in the future than we do today what economic impact do you think that's going to have is going to devalue software development I don't think so and in fact you know last um summer we published a study that we did in partnership with um Harvard University that shows that productivity gains you know from developers being 55% faster and having you know accepting 35% of code from co-pilot leads to additional GDP growth of $1.5 trillion by 2030 and that's just with the original co-pilot that doesn't factor in you know the evolution of of AI the additional leaps that we're going to see over the coming years and you know if you look back further in history we have actually seen that every time we increase productivity of the worker the demand for work has gone up now some jobs changed and I think I saw a recent study that showed that 40 or 50% of the jobs that us Americans have today didn't even exist some 100 years ago or so and so I think that's going to happen that the jobs that we're having are going to evolve we're already talking about the AI engineer which is somewhere in the middle between the traditional software engineer that uses code to build software and the data scientist that uses data to train models and and validate those models and in fact you know the AI Revolution um the age of AI in many ways has created additional demands on all the software companies now it's not no longer just maintaining the software that we have but adding AI features thinking about AI strategy and we definitely see you know the fear of Miss opportunity or fomo of those that are not yet using AI tools and asking themselves if we don't adopt AI soon enough are we going to fall behind in comparison to our competitors we saw you know in many ways the same both with the wave of the internet in the '90s and and those companies that waited to Long uh and then had to catch up we saw it with the cloud and the so-called digital transformation and we saw it with the mobile Revolution and and today you know you wouldn't open a bank account if that bank doesn't have a mobile app and I think with AI we're seeing that once again except that they're moving much faster than in the past because the productivity gains itself accelerate those companies that are investing into AI speaking of productivity gains and Engineering Talent right on one hand anyone can write basic code now that they probably couldn't but it seems if you are a talented software engineer that has good like you know system design skills you'd be 10x 100x more productive do you see that sort of like force multiplier effect where not only does it bridge the gap but it actually Accel Cates more advanced developers more than folks that are probably new to the game I think you know the tenic engineer is a term that has been to a certain degree abused by folks to differentiate themselves and say I'm so much better than everybody else uh I don't think that's the point I think the point is that every developer deserves to be more productive we're asking a lot of our software developers because if your services down it doesn't take too long until everybody gets uh angry at you on both the management side and the and the site that actually wants to buy the product and so the burden for every software developer to not only develop software but actually run and operate that software has increased by more than 10x um over the last two decades we are now living in an always on you know one hour delivery times High expectation and as such we need our software developers to become more productive and 10x won't be enough and it will be you know 10x more in in another decade and you know we talked earlier about enabling humans to build software challeng their creativity even if they're not a professional software developer so that makes that age of co-pilot so exciting it's it's actually helping both sides of that equation the professional software developers that have a lot of work to do um in an ever increasing amount of of asks for them but also the the regular you know human that just wants to channel their creativity into something cool into something meaningful into something playful the opportunity uh of this AI breakthrough is that we can Empower every human uh to build software and we can make those that chose that as choose that as a profession we can help them to become more productive to to manage these ever growing systems I want to talk about perhaps the dark side of democratization a bit it's like very exciting to consider the wide proliferation of software for sure um but what if users are developing potentially harmful software GitHub is part of Microsoft and Microsoft has for many years now talked about the responsible use of AI the ethical use of AI the secure use of AI and so we we are committ to the responsible use of AI both from a policy perspective and then we are investing heavily on the product side on the technology side and and the responsible AI pipeline when you send a prompt you know to co-pilot um there's a filter before that prompt reaches the model the model inference on and then have filters um on the outside output side of the model for uh software security is that the output filter has a security scanner so it scans that code for security vulnerabilities and if it finds the security vulnerability it either blocks that output from reaching you or uh it leverages the model to actually give you code that has uh that bug fixed for you I love that so basically if I ask GitHub to create harmful viruses or malware for example it just won't respond and if the model ends up creating code that has a known security vulnerability co-pilot will actually try and fix that code for you and Patch it or not return that code at all I'm kind of curious as we wrap up here looking ahead at your road map and of course things that you can share what are you excited about for the future of co-pilot I'm I'm really really excited about the opportunity to code in in human language in natural language to be able to describe in English or German for me um uh what I want to achieve and have the have the co-pilot help me in doing that in channeling my creativity into code and then into reality and look you know I'm the CEO of GitHub and the CEO job is lots of things that that have nothing to do with coding including recording podcasts with you and when I have time on weekends I build apps and um and web pages and the problem is um it's very complex to do that if you only have a certain amount of time an hour or two and it's really satisfying to then have an assistant available to me that makes that faster and I think that's where I'm really excited about where our W map goes with co-pilot workspace and uh and other extensions of the copilot ecosystem really expanding from you know just these basic Primitives of um predicting and completing and answering questions into agents uh that that help me to achieve a certain task and those tasks might be creative or the task might be to clean up uh to fix security vulnerabilities um to fix old code maybe to transform code from a language like cobal into into a modern language like python I think they're going to see a lot of progress on this in in the coming year I got to say your love for coding comes through the fact that you're the CEO of GitHub and the thing that you're dreaming about is to sit down with a glass of wine and do some cating after hours says it all Thomas thank you so much for your time thank you so much for having me if you're not a coder you might have listened to my conversation with Thomas Dom and thought okay this is great for coders or maybe terrible for coders but what if I don't actually code well maybe now you could maybe you have a cool idea but lack the technical knowhow to make it happen or the money to pay other coders to make it for you now ai assistants like co-pilot won't do all the work for you but they'll definitely get you over the hump and think about all those kids in school we've been pushing to learn how to code not all of them actually like it and for good reason programming can be such a pain you leave off a semicolon or put a bracket in the wrong place and your whole code breaks but an AI assistant frees you up to design software at a higher level and not get as Tangled Up In The Weeds what's also interesting thing is that GitHub has a 100 million developers today but when they reach a billion oh my God that's going to rival the monthly active users of platforms like YouTube and Tik Tok now I'm not envisioning a world where we're all going to be creators of software but we are already consumers of software and I'd be very interested to see how AI changes both software creation and consumption Thomas and I touched on this in our conversation but what I foresee is a lot more software being made for a lot less money a lot of the software might actually be disposable like that video you saw on your feed once never to be seen again and teams strapped for cash might be able to afford tailored systems that push their budgets even further and of course easier software maintenance in theory companies might be able to do a better job of catching bugs and protecting themselves from cyber attacks it doesn't cost as much to have an AI do a regular sweep of your software and spot issues as it does to hire people to do that task on the other hand if we're not careful we could have a lot more crappy software flooding the market I didn't get a chance to ask Thomas about this when we spoke but in 2021 researchers at NYU found that software created with co-pilot had a lot of security vulnerabilities like 40% of the time co-pilot has evolved a lot since then and an NYU study that came out a year later found that code written by students with AI assistance wasn't less secure than human generated code today's co-pilot specifically Works to block insecure code in real time still GitHub recommends taking the same precautions large language models are trained on human-made code after all so I think the researchers warning still holds true developers should remain Vigilant in other words don't make co-pilot your captain just [Music] yet the tedi show is a part of the Ted audio colle itive and is produced by Ted with Cosmic standard our producers are Ella feder and Sarah McCrae our editors are b b Shang and Alejandra Salazar our showrunner is Ivana Tucker and our associate producer is Ben Montoya our engineer is Asia polar Simpson our technical director is Jacob winck and our executive producer is Eliza Smith our fact Checker is Dan kalachi and I'm your host baval Sido see y'all in the next one oh [Music]