GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom

It's interesting to see a CEO express thoughts on AI and coding go in a slightly different direction.

Usually the CEO or investor says 30% (or some other made up number) of all code is written by AI and the number will only increase, implying that developers will soon be obsolete.

It's implied that 30% of all code submitted and shipped to production is from AI agents with zero human interaction. But of course this is not the case, it's the same developers as before using tools to more rapidly write code.

And writing code is only one part of a developer's job in building software.

Well, I suspect GitHub's income is a function of the number of developers using it so it is not surprising that he takes this position.

He’s probably more right than not. But he also has a vested interest in this (just like the other CEOs who say the opposite), being in the business of human-mediated code.

Presumably you're aware that the full name of Microsoft's Copilot AI code authoring tool is "GitHub Copilot", that GitHub developed it, and that he runs GitHub.

Yea, which is why I was surprised too when he said this.

Copilot. Not Pilot.

I love that the 30% quote is so miss used. You probably should watch that clip again and actually listen what he said.

The 30% reference wasn't referring to this article, but by other CEOs like Microsoft.

And those without understanding what the number means or how it was derived write misleading articles.

I was talking about the Microsoft CEO quote everyone is misquoting. He said something to affect of "at Microsoft we have _some_ repos where up to 30% of the code is _generated_". This could mean they have one C++ repo for one tool that has 30% generated header files without any LLM usage at all. Of course that is probably not what he meant and the least generous view, but I find it extremely suspect to believe that any large company, much less Microsoft, would have third of their code produced by LLMs. I find it hard to believe any profitable software company has that high of a percentage.