Nicole Forsgren: observation

Transcript context

…Absolutely. We're absolutely seeing an impact, and we continue to explore this. So I have an interesting question to see how it'll change the SPACE framework. What's open here? I think a few things will remain, right? Satisfaction's still going to be there, performance is still going to be there, activity's still going to be there. How you communicate with people and with the tool efficiency and flow is still going to be there. I believe it will change and add a dimension like trust or reliability. How do I rely? Can I rely on it? Will I have an over-reliance on it? And what we're seeing is that, probably unsurprisingly, people really fundamentally shift the way they work when they work with an AI-enabled tool like GitHub, Copilot, or Tabnine or others because now, instead of just writing code or having a short auto-complete, you spend more time reviewing code than writing code, right. There's this wonderful paper out that uses the Cups model. I'll share it with you. A team at MSR did it. Defines it, "About 50% of your time now is spent reviewing versus writing." But it'll be interesting to see how that changes things longitudinally, right. Because other... Some of my colleagues also did a paper that showed that you can do certain tasks, like build an HTTP server 50% faster, but I don't think that's what productivity's about when you're using an AI tool, frankly. Anyone who's looking at that and dear CEOs or whoever who are like, "Now I can lay off half my workforce." That's not what this is about, right. It's not about taking a task and cutting your time in half because now what we've enabled is your ability to do certain things faster and then free up some of your cognitive space so that you can do harder things with this new co-pilot sidecar or something, right. But also, because now you're accepting text and then reviewing it, we've changed what your mental model is. So we've changed the friction model that you expect. We've changed the cognitive load of what you expect. We're changing reliance on code. So what does this mean for reliance or overreliance? What does this mean for learning? What does this mean for novices versus experts? How do we measure productivity, right? There are a handful of us that are having these discussions on what does this mean and how do we communicate it thoughtfully? Again, we really need to have these kind of holistic, balanced metrics because if it's an oversimplification, we really risk losing the forest for the trees, right. But it's also super interesting and super compelling, I think. How can we think about learning or onboarding to new code bases or new languages for folks who already know computational learning? I think it's also very different for folks who are just learning programming languages and don't already know things like computational thinking. If someone was excited to kind of go down this road of, "We're going to focus on developer experience. We're going to focus on helping our engineers be more productive," what are the next step or two that they should take in your opinion just broadly knowing that you don't know any specifics about, say, the company that's thinking about this right now?…

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