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The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Other people's robots (Friends)

Fri, 17 Jan 2025

Description

Jerod & Adam discuss Nvidia's recently announced personal AI supercomputer, Waymo's latest infinite loop, what's involved in getting a "modern" terminal setup, and whether or not AI has gone mainstream... warts & all!

Audio
Transcription

Full Episode

15.157 - 36.498 Jerod

Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about Goonies deep cuts. Thanks as always to our partners at Fly, the public cloud built for developers who ship with push button deployments scaling to thousands of instances. Learn all about it at fly.io. Okay, let's talk.

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42.622 - 63.058 Adam

Well, friends, before the show, I am here with a new friend of mine, Scott Dietzen, CEO of Augment Code. I'm excited about this. Augment taps into your team's collective knowledge, your code base, your documentation, your dependencies. It is the most context-aware developer AI, so you won't just code faster, you'll also build smarter. It's an ask-me-anything-for-your-code.

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63.098 - 84.538 Adam

It's your deep-thinking buddy. It's your Stan Flo antidote. Okay, Scott. So for the foreseeable future, AI assisted is here to stay. It's just a matter of getting the AI to be a better assistant. And in particular, I want help on the thinking part, not necessarily the coding part. Can you speak to the thinking problem versus the coding problem and the potential false dichotomy there?

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84.858 - 99.313 Scott Dietzen

A couple of different points to make, you know, AIs have gotten good at making incremental changes, at least when they understand customer software. So first and the biggest limitation that these AIs have today, they really don't understand anything about your code base.

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99.373 - 117.429 Scott Dietzen

If you take GitHub Copilot, for example, it's like a fresh college graduate understands some programming languages and algorithms, but doesn't understand what you're trying to do. And as a result of that, something like two thirds of the community on average drops off of the product, especially the expert developers. Augment is different.

117.649 - 137.024 Scott Dietzen

We use retrieval augmented generation to deeply mine the knowledge that's inherent inside your code base. So we are a copilot that is an expert and that can help you navigate the code base, help you find issues and fix them and resolve them over time much more quickly than you can trying to tutor up a novice on your software.

137.441 - 144.546 Adam

So you're often compared to GitHub Copilot. I got to imagine that you have a hot take. What's your hot take on GitHub Copilot?

144.866 - 166.461 Scott Dietzen

I think it was a great 1.0 product, and I think they've done a huge service in promoting AI. But I think the game has changed. We have moved from AIs that are new college graduates to, in effect, AIs that are now among the best developers in your code base. And that difference is a profound one for software engineering in particular.

166.561 - 186.48 Scott Dietzen

You know, if you're writing a new application from scratch, you want a web page that'll play tic-tac-toe, piece of cake to crank that out. But if you're looking at, you know, a tens of millions of line code base, like many of our customers, Lemonade is one of them. I mean, 10 million line monorepo as they move engineers inside and around that code base and hire new engineers.

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