One Billion Developers! GitHub’s Head of Product Says AI Democratizes How We Build the Future

Mario Rodriguez is GitHub's Chief Product Officer. And 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 “software developer” will have to change as non-professionals discover that they can make apps, too. And the way 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; AI is helping 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.” 
• Don’t optimize for just one metric. Mario says you should have three or so that you evaluate in concert. 
• Product sense matters! 
• Prompt engineering is real. How you can better prompt your Copilot
• Keeping developers in flow is critical. 
• 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. His father is an electrical engineer and his mother is a teacher. Both influence him greatly.
• Mario 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. 

CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

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Key Moments 

• (00:00) - Intro
• (02:32) - 1B Developers!
• (05:53) - Ephemeral apps and how they will unleash creativity and learning
• (06:21) - The time Dan programmed his TI-83 calculator to play blackjack
• (07:32) - Why “natural language is going to take center stage” as software development evolves
• (10:30) - Why building with Generative AI is completely different
• (13:50) - Why humans don’t always respond well to suggestions from CoPilot
• (15:36) - Why offline evaluation is so important when building with AI
• (19:14) - Building Copilot: balancing speed with value
• (21:01) - Why “product sense” matter so much
• (21:54) - Tips for prompting CoPilot effectively
• (25:33) - Building Copilot: the early days
• (30:18) - How GitHub measures developer happiness
• (32:54) - Growing up in Cuba and developing a love for teaching (his mom’s profession) and engineering (his dad’s)
• (36:52) - Why Mario founded a school in rural North Carolina
• (39:05) - Systems thinking, and other skills that Mario hopes today’s kids will learn
• (41:50) - Outro