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AI won’t fundamentally change what it means to be a software engineer, said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke — it’ll just allow them to be more creative.
“My creativity during the coding process is limited by the time that I have available and the energy that I have — the amount of distraction I get,” he said in a YouTube interview with newsletter author Azeem Azhar. “Oftentimes, developers describe that as the magical flow state. You’re almost in the zone of building something, and as long as nobody distracts you, you really feel like you’re getting a lot of things done.”
Assistance from AI agents, Dohmke said, will make achieving and retaining that “flow state” that much easier.
“Then the moment comes where you finish the feature or get a distraction, and now you’re out of the zone and have to find it back later,” he said. “I think Copilot and agent mode keep you in that zone of creativity and let you really focus.”
In Dohmke’s mind, the process of coding is similar to “what an artist does” — part production, part creativity. With AI improving at repetitive, basic tasks, its eventual ability to take over the former will leave room for engineers to focus more heavily on the latter.
“A lot of the time, the developer is spending every day … actually on that production side of the creative process,” Dohmke said. “Often, that is the more boring piece for many developers. That’s where automation is great, because I actually want to spend more time in the creative part of it — designing, ultimately, what I’m shipping to my customers.”
Concerns over AI’s potential to replace or impact coding jobs abound, with a recent report by VC firm SignalFire suggesting it’s already contributing to the shrinking of entry-level tech opportunities for new grads. However, Dohmke said AI doesn’t represent that big a departure from the existing coding process. Ultimately, he believes it’s just another tool.
“Today, most engineers actually already start on code written by others,” he said. “They use open-source libraries, they use open-source operating systems, they have an editor that they’re not building themselves, and a debugger, and a compiler.”
Even with the help of an AI assistant, engineers still need to understand the fundamental processes behind their work, Dohmke said — AI simply changes the way they go about completing it.
“We’re already composing different pieces into software, and we’re moving up the abstraction,” he said. “AI will help us to achieve that, and then we will review the work of the AI to make sure it’s secure, and compliant, and runs efficiently.”
Dohmke did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.
At its core, Dohmke doesn’t believe that what it means to be a software engineer will really change.
“I think you know the developer will do mostly what engineers actually do, and how they define themselves, which is they’re solving problems,” he said. “They’re implementing ideas.”
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