Transcript
Kyle Daigle (0:00)
Foreign.
Podcast Host / Announcer (0:06)
The podcast that makes artificial intelligence practical, productive and accessible to all. If you like this show, you will love the Changelog. It's news on Mondays, deep technical interviews on Wednesdays and on Fridays. An awesome talk show for your weekend enjoyment. Find us by searching for the Changelog wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our partners at Fly IO. Launch your AI apps in five minutes or less. Learn how at Fly IO.
Daniel Whitenack (0:44)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. This is Daniel Whitenack. I'm CEO at PredictionGuard and I'm joined as always by my co host Chris Benson, who is is a principal AI research engineer at Lockheed Martin. How you doing, Chris?
Chris Benson (1:01)
Doing great, Daniel. How's it going today?
Daniel Whitenack (1:03)
It's going great. I was just commenting before we hopped on about I'm feeling the emotional boost of seeing the sun again after a long Midwest winter. So feeling good today and excited to chat about all things AI and code assistant and development and all of those things because we have with us Kyle Daigle, who is COO@GitHub. Welcome, Kyle.
Kyle Daigle (1:30)
Thank you so much. So great to be here.
Daniel Whitenack (1:32)
Yeah, it's awesome to have you on, just even in your comments about how you like to think about the practical side of AI. This is your place. So I already feel a kindred spirit.
Kyle Daigle (1:46)
I feel very much at home already.
Daniel Whitenack (1:49)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of which, I mean, you're of course really kind of at the center of a lot of what's going on in terms of code assistance with GitHub Copilot, of course, but you're also, I'm sure, seeing a ton of things out there. I'm wondering if you could just kind of take a 10,000 foot view and kind of for those that maybe aren't following all of the things happening with AI code assistance and development. What's kind of like as of now, sitting in, what is it, March of, of 2025, if you're listening to this, what's kind of the state of AI code assistance and how people are kind of generally using those right now?
Kyle Daigle (2:34)
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting to see how far I feel like we've come in such a short period of time. Right. It was only a couple of Years ago when ChatGPT came out, GitHub Copilot came out. And back then the novelty was sort of like it wasn't going to disappoint you. Right. For GitHub Copilot, you know, you would type some lines and, and it would respond with, you know, a line, two lines, a method, etcetera it was going to complete your code very similar to, you know, I'm going to ask instead of Google a question, I'm going to ask ChatGPT and I can keep asking a question. I think what really, you know, locked in this enormous transformation then was, was finding a user experience that was simple, straightforward, and didn't need much explanation, right? Like I'm a dev, I'm writing code and it's just working there versus, you know, needing to figure out how to use a tool, figure out how it works in my workflow, and kind of go through hours of onboarding. Fast forward a couple of years, right? Not only have the models materially gotten so much better, but we found more and more ways to kind of have that similar joyful, expected user experience with code assistance. So it's not just really about writing the code in some ways, right? It's not about that at all right now. I think that's at the bleeding edge of what we're experiencing with code assistance, where it's much, much, much more about sitting down with a couple of dev friends and saying, hey, I have this idea for an app, but instead of pitching it to your friends, now you're pitching it to your ide and that code assistant is going to jump in and help you get that next step done. So when I look back over this wave and how it went from sort of, you know, cool, but in retrospect, right, a little bit simplistic behavior of, wow, it really knows what I want to write next into, like the next level of what it's always been like to be a developer, which is I have this idea and now I have to explain it to someone else. We keep finding ways to augment, improve and speed up what a dev does kind of every single day. And we're at a point now where I think we're seriously starting to blur the edges of like, what is a developer. I don't think we're there all the way, to be very clear, but I think, you know, a year ago we were talking about that and it was like, sure. And now it's getting closer and closer to say, you know, well, what is that distinct, that distinct need? And that's only really been in a year and then, you know, about two and a half, three years from the start of the start of this journey. And so I think the code assistant category has always been so interesting to me because it doesn't. It's kind of matching how we work, you know, it's finding ways to augment and improve how we work, not trying to teach us totally to do something completely different, which I think when we zoom maybe from 10,000ft to 40,000ft, and we look at AI, the best tools are the ones that are just helping us do work we're already doing. The tools that aren't the best or having more difficulty finding traction, in my opinion, tend to have to make the human contort to get the most power out of the AI tool. And so because we're devs, we're just kind of iterating in what we know. And that's been the power of code assistants and the growth of them over the last year or so. I think.
