Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it's a good question. Like I said, I was working on development tools and developer services when I was there at Microsoft. Specifically, I was leading product for what they call One Engineering System. It's essentially the shared developer infrastructure for all Microsoft products like Windows and Office and Azure and things like that, as well as Microsoft's DevOps solution called Azure DevOps. When the acquisition happened, it was clear that so much of the energy, so much of the focus and the innovation that was going to be happening around developer tools and services was going to be happening around GitHub. I mean, that's where the community is creating. That's where people are learning, that's where so much of the mind share of just the development community is focused. Like I said, I'm motivated. What I care about is helping people create. It was very clear to me that there was no place that I could have a larger impact than working at GitHub. I really took that opportunity to make the transition out of a little bit more enterprise focused internal role at Microsoft to going where I could work on everything from, I don't know, AI technology like Copilot to a cloud hosted development environments like Codespaces, repos, which literally every single developer on the planet is participating in some way GitHub repos in a typical year. That was what I wanted to accomplish, is just like, how do I get more connected to the community, especially the community outside of what Microsoft could reach on its own. The decision to move as well, I think, was really focused not just on what GitHub was and maybe is at the time, but what GitHub also can be. I mean, GitHub has more than a decade, nearly a decade and a half of history of bringing developers together to collaborate on code through repositories. But in the last few years, we've really expanded that portfolio to include so many different parts of the developer life cycle. Again, I talked there about Codespaces and Copilot, but it's also actions for CI/CD and advanced security. As developers, we are so much more than just where we put our code. There's a whole part of the tool chain there. And to get to an opportunity to work on so many V1 products, like that is creation itself, to be able to build an entirely new product, get it out to market, test it, iterate on it, and really feed on the energy that's coming back from the community. Awesome. There's definitely a lot of energy coming out of GitHub. What I want to spend most of our time chatting about is a product that your team helped launch and incubate, which is GitHub Copilot, which just from my outsider perspective feels like one of the biggest advances in software development in, I don't know, a decade, maybe more. It's definitely one of the most magical products out there and your team and you kind of led the incubation and launch of the Copilot. I'd love to spend most of our time chatting through that. The first question... Okay, cool. My first question just for folks that don't know a lot about Copilot is just like, what is it? Can you just kind of briefly describe what Copilot is? Yeah, sure. Developers for the last 20 years or more have had essentially simple, intelligent autocomplete. You hit the period and you get the next variable that might come up. It's helpful for moving a little bit faster through your code, helpful sometimes for remembering what the particular syntax might look like for a method or a function. Copilot is essentially that magnified by many lines of code. It is multi-line autocomplete that is fundamentally powered by an AI model called CodeX, which is a derivative of another one that you might be familiar with, GPT-3. When you are in the editor, it could be VS Code, it could be IntelliJ, it could be them, essentially, as you are typing, Copilot will provide suggestions usually in kind of this italicized gray text that is really, to your point, kind of magical what it's able to infer. Based upon the variables around it, the class names, the method names around it, your comments, Copilot infers what you intend to create, and then hopefully does a pretty good job at nailing it by providing scaffolding code template that you can then riff on. Now, what we tend to find is that developers love it. They really enjoy it. They kind of find themselves getting a little addicted to it because it helps them stay in the flow. As developers, we love to be in that place. I love to be in that place where I'm creating things, where I'm focusing on some product, some piece of software that I'm going to give to my customers, my users. The labor of remembering what's the order of parameters that need to come into a particular API, or hey, what's the particular syntax of this thing I'm supposed to do, or oh, I've got to create a bunch of dummy data that is days of the week or months in the year. That's just labor. It's not creating. It's just typing. Copilot helps developers stay in the flow by bringing all of that information into the editor, preventing them from having to go check out documentation or watch tutorial or go to Stack Overflow and either find an answer or worse, have to ask a question and wait for an answer. It just brings all of that into the editor and gives the developer often multiple suggestions that they can choose from and just pick and choose what is the right solution to solve the problem for the thing they're trying to create.…

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