Developers are emotionally attached to their tools

**Ryan Donovan** (0:07)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology.
I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we're going to be talking about the IDE and its place in the AI age. My guest for that is Trisha Gee, who is a Java champion and a developer productivity advocate. So welcome to the show, Trisha.

**Trisha Gee** (0:27)
Thank you for having me.

**Ryan Donovan** (0:28)
Before we get into the IDE business, give us a little insight into where you came from. How do you got into software and technology?

**Trisha Gee** (0:35)
As I get older, this story gets longer.
I came through as a classic route, if you like. So I'm fairly old. So I started coding when I was about nine, in the 80s, like a lot of my cohort did with Basic. And then I did computing A-level when I was 16-18, because I'm from the UK, that's what we do. And then I did a computer science degree, computer science and artificial intelligence, actually, back in the turn of the century. AI was very different back then.

**Ryan Donovan** (1:03)
Yes, I took an AI class back then too.

**Trisha Gee** (1:06)
Yes, it was different, but then there was only two schools of thought, like classic search-based AI and modern neural networks AI.
It was kind of interesting to learn about the two different approaches. Fortunately, I went to the University of Sussex and they taught Java, back when it was Java 1.1 and it was brand new.
So I was really lucky that when I came out of university in the early noughties, I had experience in Java. I'd been working for Ford Motor Company as an undergraduate. So I kind of knew what professional software development looked like and kind of got into web development and Java stuff in the early noughties. Spent about 10 years as a classic software engineer doing Java and web stuff. And then I worked at Elmax with Dave Farley when he was writing the Continuous Delivery book and we did a whole bunch of XP and we did Continuous Delivery and we did like all the stuff I'd read about for like 10 years and I've never seen anyone really do. And I'm like, oh, this is what software engineering should be all about. I worked there for four years and I loved every minute of it. And I had such a good time then I learned a lot about using the IDE. We were pair programming in IntelliJ IDEA. And previously I'd kind of, I'd used an IDE obviously, and I kind of did some basic stuff with it. This is in like 2012 ish. And then when you're pair programming with people, every individual you pair with has a set of tricks that they use. And so as a team, you all get much better because you all learn everyone else's little tricks. So I learned a whole load about the IDE. And I learned a lot about how to work effectively in software and productivity and how XP works in the real world. And I thought, what I want to do is I want to go out there and tell other developers there is hope and everything doesn't have to be rubbish.
And all those jobs that you're doing, which are just kind of your classic software development grind jobs, like it doesn't have to be that way. There are lots of things you can do on lots of different dimensions to kind of improve your life as a software developer. And that's kind of how I got into advocacy, because I'm like, I want to go to conferences and write blog posts and do videos sort of showing people tricks with IDE and telling people like where the trade-offs are with certain agile techniques or certain design things and sort of talk about the pragmatic implementation of the things you read about in books. And so with that, I ended up working at MongoDB, worked at JetBrains doing IntelliJ stuff and got to Gradle doing Developer Productivity Advocacy. So that brings us to now where now with the AI thing, to begin with, I'm like, where does my IDE experience and my sort of classic software engineering experience, where does this fit in this new world order? Especially because I'm not hands-on coding stuff, although I did rewrite my website using Claude, of course, because everyone does. But what's really interesting and what I'm doing now is just trying to figure out what's still relevant in the age of AI. What is genuine productivity?
And what is noise as we travel along the hype curve for AI?

**Ryan Donovan** (4:02)