Developer Tool UX in the Age of Generative AI

**Alasdair Monk** (0:00)
One trend that I think has been really interesting is like how we had this specialization of jobs, and this kind of blurriness between what jobs were, breakdown, but also maybe how AI actually brings us back to that point, and it actually begins to erode some of that specialization. Like, I had never written a line of Python, and without Copilot, it would have been a very slow experience for me. But with Copilot, I know vaguely what I want to do, because it's very similar to other programming languages. And that's what it really gave me, was like, oh, all this knowledge, which I don't have to accumulate slowly over years, I can kind of harness it very quickly, tailored exactly to the situation of the thing that I'm building, with basically zero effort, which is crazy.

**Derrick Harris** (0:45)
Welcome to the a16z AI podcast, where, as the name suggests, we discuss artificial intelligence, often focusing on how generative AI is shifting markets and introducing new capabilities to existing workflows. I'm Derek Harris, and this week I'm again joined by a16z partner Yoko Lee, as well as Alasdair Monk. Alasdair is a design engineer, presently leading user experience at an AI coding startup called Poolside, and has spent much of his career improving the UX for developer tools. We discuss Alasdair's journey, including stints at dev-centered companies such as Heroku slash Salesforce, and how generative AI is changing how developers, and those building for developers, interact with the tools of their trade. Here we go.
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**Alasdair Monk** (1:54)
I've kind of always been interested in DevTools, I guess.
And that's been pretty much my entire professional career, has been working with DevTooling and developer-focused products. When I was a kid, I had a Commodore 64, which even then was a relic, you know, it was like a really old-timey computer, even in whenever this was, like 1997 But the really cool thing about those computers is they really will do like kind of anything you want. They're like kind of programming first as a consumer device, which is pretty cool. I went to university and I studied IT, so information technology, which here is kind of like a mix of computer science and business studies. So it was like a great mix for me. That was a funny time because I think I, I guess I didn't really know about the sort of career path of design. And obviously I knew about like graphic design, but I'd never considered myself arty, which I think at least I used to think of that as being a sort of prerequisite to being a graphic designer. It was a four-year course with one year out of university. I kind of went through the motions and I ended up getting a job at like a big IT firm here in the UK. I rocked up on my first day and they were like, great, you're going to be like a visual basic, literally visual basic programmer for this like 12 month, 11 month period, whatever it was.
And I quit at lunchtime. That's how badly I didn't want that job. And anyway, I ended up meeting up with a friend of mine who was working in advertising. He was working at an advertising startup in London.
And I basically got a job there doing whatever, it's like a sort of internship.
And that was really my entryway to design in the sense of interaction design and web design and branding and marketing, but also doing some front end work. And yeah, that was really what I think kind of put me on the path to what I ended up doing. I kind of hopped around various kind of different advertising agencies and doing mostly kind of web design work. I started working for a startup here in London called Go Cardless, that's still going super strong. But when I joined, I think they were maybe 10 or 12 people. They were like very, very small. I learned there about like designing APIs, and it was kind of like a UK version of Stripe, I guess is a very simple way to put it. So it was like a very developer first product. And I really loved that. I built a lot of stuff with it. That was the thing that I found to be most fun about the job was designing a product and then being able to use it in the evenings and build fun things with it.