GitHub CEO Thomas Domke says AI and software development are now inextricably linked, supported by utilities like Copilot and the associated Copilot Chat, which the Microsoft-owned company has expanded to include individual GitHub subscribers today.
But while speaking on stage at TC Disrupt today, Domke stressed that the AI revolution is gathering pace wont It is the death knell for the software development industry.
“Demand for software developers will continue to outpace supply,” Domke said in a discussion with TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois.
Domke, among many other technology leaders, has long insisted that AI tools like Copilot will make developers more productive, rather than replace them. But what about the future, say, a decade from now?
“The amount of software in 10 years will grow dramatically,” Domke said. “We have an ever-increasing number of lines of code that we have to manage, an ever-increasing number of ideas that we have, and quite frankly, every company is now a software company.”
Although AI is undoubtedly here to stay, Domke noted that although software development may evolve, there are several reasons why developers will remain in high demand for the foreseeable future. One is the huge amount of legacy code that still exists in its original form.
“If you go to banks and financial institutions and talk to a CTO, they will tell you that they have been using COBOL code since the 1960s, and those developers from the 1960s are all retired now,” Domke said. “This symbol at that time was not written with it Unit tests And with CI/CD, so someone has to maintain that and hopefully convert the COBOL code to Java or Python. And we’re not talking yet about code from the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
Of course, there may not always be a need to maintain legacy code as companies evolve their stack. But generative AI itself will create more need for tech talent, according to Domke.
“We have a shortage of computer science students, certainly in the Western world, from Berlin to San Francisco to Sydney,” he said. “Generative AI has just created another wave of demand, as more companies with bold ideas, both small and large, are now thinking about how to adopt innovative AI into their business model, looking for developers [who] Learn how to use the open API, or train an (AI) model.”