Simplicity is key for the future of software development and education #ai #softwaredevelopment

Mario Rodriguez is the SVP of Product at GitHub. He believes that Copilot and other AI advances will unleash a wave of creativity and enable a billion people to be software developers.
Mario says the definition of “a software developer” will have to change as non-professionals discover they can make apps, too. And how they do so will look very different: “It's gonna feel a lot more like how kids play. ​​It's like you create something you play with and you're like, Nope. Then you instruct it again… It’s going to be real-time development.”

On this episode of CRAFTED., Mario gets us excited about the future of software development!

Takeaways:
Mario says we’ve lost some of the creativity of the early days of the web, and AI is going to help bring it back
With AI, it’s getting much easier (for non-professional developers) to build “micro experiences” and other ephemeral apps that just serve one purpose.
The craft of product management must change with AI, because building with non-deterministic AI is so tricky to get right
When building with AI, run your scenario multiple times. Test your prompts repeatedly. You will get different responses each time. Are they all helpful to your user?
Invest in offline evaluation when building with AI or else you’ll have lots of problems later.
Psychology is key. How will users react if AI tells them something subjective? Mario has seen CoPilot users get upset, e.g. “Nope, you're completely wrong. I know what I'm doing. You are a machine. I am not gonna ask you to ever review my code.” So consider ways to massage the responses and the UX.
Don’t only optimize for one metric. Mario says you should have three or so that you evaluate in concert.
Product sense matters!
Product management is art + science.
Prompt engineering is a real thing. Better prompts lead to better responses. Mario says he’s found short sentences and saying “please” help. He also shares ways people “hack” CoPilot to give it more context.
Keeping developers in flow is critical. We discuss many ways that CoPilot evolved to do that well.
How much time do developers spend on “sense-making” vs. coding? How much time do they spend waiting for reviews? These are some of the questions GitHub asks when evaluating developer productivity.
Mario came to the US from Cuba when he was in high school. He didn’t speak English then. His father is an electrical engineer and his mother is a teacher. Both influence him greatly and it’s why he loves engineering and teaching.
Mario has founded a charter school in rural North Carolina because “everyone should have access to amazing education.”
System thinking and evaluating things from first principles are key skills for the future.

CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run, and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services, and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications.

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Where to find Mario Rodriguez:
X: @mariorod1 and @github

Where to find the host, Dan Blumberg:
X: @dblums (needs to be linked)

Where to find Docker:
X: @docker
Instagram: @dockerinc

#ai #machinelearning #github