Technology for the sake of happiness

The following is a readout of my prepared remarks delivered at WeAreDevelopers 2022.?

Hello. I’m Thomas. And I’m a developer.

Hello, WeAreDevelopers! It’s so great to be here with you today.?I am Thomas. And I am a developer.?

And I must admit, this is such a special moment for me today. To be in this conference center, to be back in Berlin.?I grew up in Berlin, this is my home town, but I moved away 20 years ago. Every time I land at the airport here, I get a bit sentimental.?

Just hearing people speaking with Berlin dialect brings back flashes of my past life, memories, it’s like rediscovering an old love. I love this city.?I was born in Berlin Marzahn, which is east from here, on the other side of the wall. This is me at just a few years old, going on a walk with my parents and my newborn baby brother.

This was the late 70s, roughly at the same time when companies like Apple and Microsoft were founded. But in East Germany, you couldn’t just buy a computer. Instead, I had a calculator and played with it all the time. It wasn’t a small fancy one as you can buy today, it was huge and had a green backlit LED display. I used it to collect and sum up the milk money for my class in elementary school. I loved this calculator.

A few years later, it was 1988, that I saw a computer, a Robotron KC85, I think, in the display window of the large department store at Alexanderplatz. That’s when I knew I wanted to become a software developer. That evening, I told my parents that I want to build software.?I had to wait a while longer, until I finally was able to buy a Commodore 64 in 1991. At this point the wall had fallen.

A few years later, it was 1998, and I was now studying computer engineering at TU Berlin, when I first got in touch with open source and bought my first Linux distribution in the book store nearby.?And I finally had internet access without paying per minute.

Because of software, open source and the internet, my life has now gone places I never thought it could.?

So now, standing back here in Berlin, with all these sentiments refreshing, I’m reminded of just how far we’ve come as developers. Software has advanced so much in such a short period.

In just the last forty years, we’ve gone from home computers like the Apple II, to the invention of open source, to broad distribution with the internet, to phones in our pockets that are more powerful than we ever imagined. We can take software wherever we go.?

With every new advancement in software, we’ve built things together that are changing lives and even landing on different planets with little helicopters.??

And as the world has gone online, we as software developers have become the backbone of every organization who is innovating and thriving. And, everybody has realized by now: open source has won!

The collaborative model that comes with open source, that open source has established, is actually better.?No one company can outcompete the millions of open source developers, working in public together.

And despite all these incredible advancements we’ve experienced – I am here to tell you, we’re just at the beginning of the golden era of software development.?

There will be greater change in the next 5 years than in the last 40. We are entering a fundamental transformation of software development as we know it…and I think it will make us all happier.?

That’s the key, happier. Let me tell you why.

AI is not tomorrow. It’s today.?

In 1950, Alan Turing, a founding father of Artificial Intelligence, asked the question, “Can a machine think?”

Since then, we’ve heard prophecies of “AI taking over” for decades. We’ve seen it become this scary, ominous thing in popular culture. And it's still largely framed in this way.

You’ve heard it: AI is coming. It’s going to change everything. But that narrative is all wrong. Because we’ve continued to talk about something in the abstract that has already arrived.?

AI is not tomorrow. It’s today. And it's already acting as a copilot in our daily lives.

Apple Photos is helping us create automatic photo albums of our loved ones. Google Docs is helping college students write their term papers. With Tesla, now cars are almost driving themselves. And let's not forget, at the beginning of the pandemic, Alexa was helping us order toilet paper in mass.

AI has already become a natural extension of humanity. But until now, AI stopped short of influencing code creation – the process has remained manual.

Developers are done waiting. AI pair programmers are here.?

GitHub Copilot is a pair programmer in your editor that is always available to you. When you type code or comments, it proposes the next word for you.?But not only a single word, it can actually propose whole methods, lots of boilerplate code, whole unit tests, even complex algorithms.

You may have seen large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 that were trained on human language like English or German. Copilot uses an OpenAI model called Codex that was trained on open source in different programming languages.?

Since we launched the Copilot beta, we have seen many happy developers, some of them skeptical at first, most of them quite impressed after a few days and many can’t live without Copilot anymore.?

In fact, we see that in files where Copilot is enabled, we are already seeing nearly 40% of the code being suggested by Copilot. Think about that, nearly 40% of the code predicted by an ML model. And that is just the beginning. In fact, in 5 years, I predict that number will be 80%.?

So now you are probably asking yourself, like Alan Turing did, does that mean AI is taking over and going to do everything I do? The answer is: NO. AI will NOT replace developers.?

The model behind GPT-3 and Codex is not intelligent. It’s not creative. All it does is predict the next word or method based on what you, the creator, has typed before. AI needs you to code.?

As developers, we have gone through similar transitions before, from punch cards to higher programming languages.?Similarly, open source changed our world when the internet became ubiquitous. Copilot is just the next step of this.?

Instead of writing all the code myself, I am leveraging the interface between me and my AI pair programmer to create the thing I want to create. Just like all of the activities I listed earlier, it’s built to act as an extension of your toolset and yourself, to help you to be more creative.?Let me show you how it works:?

<live demo of Copilot>

AI will not only accelerate what we can achieve, but opens the doors for others to develop software.

AI will make coding more accessible, giving people with disabilities the ability to write code easier.?AI will help students learn faster and on ramp quicker – which will help solve the global developer shortage.?And it will help all of you solve problems!

You can sign up for the preview now and I’m excited to share that we will make Copilot generally available very soon. Like, really really soon. It will be free for students as well as verified open source contributors. This is so exciting!?

And AI wouldn’t be possible without something else…without the second trend: The Cloud.

It’s developers time for the cloud.?

These large language models run on thousands of GPUs, and while the GPU in your computer is getting faster, the models grow even faster.

For years, we have seen companies across the world move their products and their operations to the cloud. And developers have been the ones helping them do it.?

Developers have built countless products to enable this — salespeople with Salesforce, designers with Figma, accountants with NetSuite. And yet, software development is still mostly local.

How developers write code on their local machines hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years. We are still largely bound to a specific device.?This is changing. And it’s really time for the change. We’ve been the stewards of cloud migration, and it’s time for us to get the same benefit.?

We believe so much in this that we built a new product, Codespaces. Codespaces moves the entire development environment to a virtual machine.?

A software developer still uses a laptop, but the whole environment, all the tools, dependencies, compilers, all of this goes on a virtual machine for the specific project. Cloud-powered coding has many benefits, and I want to explain those to you in the context of open source.

One original promise of open source was that we could quickly work on anything with anyone in the world, switching between projects at will.?Yet, it takes hours, sometimes days to onboard into a new job or project. The cloud erases this onboarding time.

At GitHub, we have moved over 800 developers to Codespaces and reduced onboarding time from 45 minutes to less than a single minute.?With the cloud, you will be able to nearly instantly access projects, whenever you need — giving you the velocity to onboard multiple projects wherever you are.

But it goes beyond this, the move to the cloud gives developers: Nearly infinite compute power - you can have as many environments as you want.

And it gives you greater security - the dev environment is separated from all the other stuff on your laptop, so when you run “sudo curl SOME_URL”, the scripts coming with the packages can’t access your email or photos.?And of course, a dev environment in the cloud is updated every night or so with the same CI/CD process as your production environment.

The second promise of open source was free access. Free as in free speech, not free beer. Everyone has the freedom to create, fork, and modify whatever open source software they want. Because of the cloud, access to open source will be more democratized than ever before.

?It will help give access to coding environments for a new generation of developers across the world. We can meet developers where they are, and we can offer them a full dev environment even if they only have a tablet or Chromebook available.

Whether you are a kid, a student, or somebody who wants to learn coding, all you need is a screen, a keyboard, and an online connection. The cloud makes all this possible.?

I have no doubt, this transformation is going to help developers. And I think the shift to the cloud will happen at such a rapid rate, that in just a few years I predict there will be: No more code on your local computer.?

It will all be in the cloud, on many dev environments that you control from your local machine.

Technology for the sake of happiness.?

This is going to be a big moment for us. Not only is about 80% of code going to be written with the help of AI, but no more code on local computers. I hope you are as excited as I am about these truly monumental changes.

But, you know, I don't believe big innovations are better just because everything has to grow and get bigger. To me, innovations are only successful if they make us as developers, us as humans, happier in our lives.?

For the last forty years, through every innovation, through every transformation, developers have become more productive. Our velocity has skyrocketed. And when we don’t work, we have to be on call in case the servers go down.

We are keeping the lights on for our organizations all over the world, and with COVID for the last 2 years and us working from home, it has become increasingly unclear what is work and what is life.?

And because of our responsibility, life often takes the backseat.?

Yet, I continue to hear over and over – how we must build technology that will make developers more productive. I get it all the time.?I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing that. We are productive.

How many times can we prove this? I say: enough with that.

No longer should we innovate technology for technology's sake.?No longer should we innovate technology just for productivity's sake.?What we need is to innovate technology for the sake of happiness!

The emergence of AI, the shift to the cloud – all of it is designed to help you do what you love. To connect you with your creativity.?Whether it’s the AI pair programmer in your editor or the readily available Codespaces for any project -- all these things will help you with the things you don’t want to do, so you can spend more time enjoying the things that you do. Whether it's on your computer or in your personal life.?

Because when you can do what you love, better, easier, with more help, this creates a pathway for your happiness. And everyone, not just developers, should care about developer happiness.

Our happiness is vital to the function of the modern world. Because the modern world relies on software.??

And if developers are burnt out, the world won’t be able to solve its greatest challenges – because they just can’t do it without us.?

Happy developers will help solve climate change. Happy developers will advance science that saves lives.?And happy developers will help humanity build a bridge into the universe!

The world has won if we generate happy developers.

But don’t let this critical responsibility scare you. Let it motivate you.?

To echo Uncle Ben from Spiderman: with great power comes great responsibility, and with great responsibility will come even greater opportunity.?As technology has advanced, we’ve only become more needed, more in demand – and our opportunity has only grown compared to when I became a developer.?

When I became a developer, all I wanted to do is write code. And through writing code, my life has taken me places I never dreamed were possible.?

In the last thirty years, because of the advance of software, I went from playing behind the Berlin wall, to coding software in my bedroom, to founding a startup, to moving to America for new opportunities, to standing here back in Germany with all of you, back in my home, as CEO of GitHub.?

And we are only at the beginning of the golden era for developers! So if I could get here, I’m certain – that with all the changes ahead – you will not only be able to achieve anything, but you will be able to become whoever you want in this world.?And you’ll be happy doing it.?

I can’t wait to see what you do. Let’s change the world together!