AI Tooling For Your Dev Team: To Adopt or Not to Adopt? | CodiumAI's Itamar Friedman

**Itamar Friedman** (0:00)
There is a very good chance that if you have a serious pain, there is an AI tool for that. Focus on two, three pains the most, if not even one. Go do the research, you'll probably find a few tools. Think about what's your biggest pain. Research, check the comments, check issues, check usage, and see those that are companies in your domains and using it.
Choose two or three, experiment, because it could be different for you. I don't think all of this should take more than one week, and I think one of the great things about AI tools that many of them are really easy to use, like ChatGPT or so.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:34)
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**Isha Iberia** (1:54)
Hey, everyone, and welcome to Dev Interrupted. My name is Isha Iberia, I'm the CTO at Linear B and I'm filling in for Dan Lines today. Some of you may have seen me from previous episodes, mostly of our labs.
That's because I work a lot with our data team and I'm exposed to a lot of the exciting stuff that we're doing with understanding the behaviors of developers, dev teams at large, using the huge data that we have. I'm happy to dive into AI today, the buzzword that everyone is talking about and I have a special guest. So welcome Itamar Friedman, the co-founder and CEO at Codium, Itamar.

**Itamar Friedman** (2:30)
Yes, I'm happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

**Isha Iberia** (2:33)
Great to have you, thanks for joining. So I always like to start with my guest, give me a brief overview of your background, your journey so far. So you're now co-founder and CEO of Codium, but how have you started and how did you get here?

**Itamar Friedman** (2:48)
Great, I'll do it shortly. So I was a two-time CTO of VC-backed startups.
So actually 20 years of R&D or CTO management and hacking. My last company I sold was acquired by Alibaba Group. Then I joined Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba journey was fascinating. I was there for four years. We did quite a few projects, but two products that I'm really proud of is one that we build an auto ML solution. As part of Alibaba Cloud, it means that we automated machine learning ML model creation. And the second one was actually a B2C app that within one and a half year of development from Israel, we reached to 10 million monthly active users and it's growing nicely and already monetizing, et cetera. Before that, I did a bachelor and a master degree in a tech neon, like mastering in machine learning.
Optimization was one of my favorite topics.
And I worked on here and there a few startups, maybe in companies, maybe the worth mentioning that in the early days, I worked in verification, like in Mellanox and actually it was hard verification. And then I worked on system verification in a company called Silk. So that's also relevant to what I'm doing today. So roughly speaking, that's my background.

**Isha Iberia** (4:07)
Great. So you moved from more like the formal stuff of ML and verification all the way to the new fluffy area of, I don't know, generative AI. Can you tell us a little bit about Codium? What does Codium do?

**Itamar Friedman** (4:22)
Yeah, of course. So yeah, like the really early days of my career, if you can call it this way, was actually when I was a teenager and I had my first company and like 40 clients and quite a few employees. I'm mentioning it because one of my ever first employees was today my co-founder, Daddy Carretto, so we know each other for 25 years or more. But just to say that I did like web, mobile, hardware, system, networking, storage. But my major is machine learning, actually even robotics. But almost in all of these, I had like algorithms involved and machine learning. So I've seen like algorithms from the previous century, those of the 2000, 2010 And my master degree, I actually deal with a bit of deep learning.