Thomas Dohmke—ex CEO of Github—shares his take on the AI vs Developer+AI argument. He still thinks developers will need to get their fundamentals right, review and verify AI generated code, understand and design. But then also acknowledges that AI is going to bring in a significant change in the way developers code in the future.
Developers rarely mentioned “time saved” as the core benefit of working in this new way with agents. They were all about increasing ambition. We believe that means that we should update how we talk about (and measure) success when using these tools, and we should expect that after the initial efficiency gains our focus will be on raising the ceiling of the work and outcomes we can accomplish, which is a very different way of interpreting tool investments. This helps explain the – perhaps unintuitive at first – observation that many of the developers we interviewed were paying for top-tier subscriptions. When you move from thinking about reducing effort to expanding scope, only the most advanced agentic capabilities will do.
The last sentence in bold ties back to the title of this post.
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