GitHub CEO Believes Copilot Will Write 80% of Code

In an interview with Freethink, GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke, commented that he believes Microsoft’s Copilot will soon be writing the majority of code. Though not shocking, this is yet another industry that will likely see the greater inclusion of AI in everyday work life.

While speaking with Freethink, Thomas Dohmke was asked about the overall direction of programming. Specifically, will software development could become dominated by on-code development? In response, Dohmke pointed to advance problem-solving and the complexity of software. Saying in part,  “being able to take a really big problem, big challenge, big new feature and decomposing it into small problems — will play an ever-increasing role.”

He continued and made clear that AI has an increasingly growing place in the overall workflow. “At least for the foreseeable future, we’re still going to have to review all that source code — understand what it does, and do security reviews, compliance review, see if you’re having a prompt injection, where somebody tries to inject harmful code into the code base.”

Finally, he finishes by making it clear that developers will still need to be handling the wheel with AI. Though as time goes on, and technology advances, there will be a shift in how much a developer codes on their own. But he acknowledges that no-code can’t just outright replace human programmers. He said in part, “But I don’t think we are remotely close to where everything will be just no-code development.”

So if something like Copilot isn’t going to replace coders, what could a day in the life of a developer and Copilot look like? Thomas Dohmke answers this by making clear, developers aren’t spending the entire workday coding. There are meetings, crash reports, and other items to address.

Coding only takes up a few hours, if that, a day. But with a program like Copilot, a developer, “can leverage the creative time better, and you can kind of zone into the problem, because if you’re not constantly switching out of the editor to something else, you also have fewer triggers to get distracted. So we see that people are staying in the zone more often.”

Thomas Dohmke got more specific and said, “80% of the code is going to be written by Copilot. And that doesn’t mean, as we discussed, that the developer is going to be replaced. That means that the developer has more time to focus on the 20% that they’re writing.”

Overall, it can help shift focus away from what can be automated so developers have more time to be creative in their work.