AI coding tools are everywhere. So, what approach should software engineers take to make the most of them?
Github CEO Thomas Dohmke explained in an episode of “Mad Podcast With Matt Podcast,” released Thursday that he believes he is “the key to winning” in the arena.
“I think the key to winning is having a continuum where you can get the agent's write code and send pull requests, but as a developer, if you want to see that code and make three quick changes, you have to be able to bring it to your local machine and make those changes,” Dohmke said.
The worst option, he said, is for developers to “try to figure out how to provide feedback right now to explain in natural languages that they already know how to do that in programming languages.”
This situation is “replaced with something that can basically be done in three seconds with something that can take three minutes or more, which is obviously not too much productivity, that's not much productivity,” Dohmke said.
In other words, instead of wasting valuable time instructing AI to make such changes, software developers should be able to enhance the code generated by AI tools on the fly.
“We've now been able to allow developers to navigate between these categories and choose an agent that provides the best ROI, or do it on their own. I think that's the key to winning in the next few years,” he concluded.
In a recent Q&A session at Startup Campus Station F in Vivedch, Paris, Dohmke also talked about the Buzzy “Vibe Coding” phenomenon.
Openai co-founder Andrej Karpathy created the term earlier this year to describe writing code with a big leaning towards AI tools, allowing him to “suffocate the atmosphere completely” and “even if he forgets the code.”
Dohmke said in his Q&A that he doesn't think startups can do it with just vibe coding.
“Non-technical founders will find it difficult to build a startup of scale without developers,” he said, “we can't build a complex system to justify the next round.”
“The value of a startup is not defined by what can be developed using inexpensive means,” Dohmke says.
