Forget vibe coding. Say hello to vibe entrepreneurship. | Shopify’s Andrew McNamara

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler, and this week we're bringing Andrew McNamara, Director of Applied Machine Learning at Shopify, on the show to discuss a new topic, Vibe Entrepreneurship and the future of e-commerce. And Shopify has been killing it recently, and it was really fun to chat with Andrew about all the things they're cooking up over there. But first, we're kicking off the show today with something a little different. Instead of our standard news roundup, we're presenting a special report to dive deep into the topic at the forefront of our industry, the economics of software innovation and how AI is impacting it. And to help us do that, we're joined by a special guest and my dear friend Fatima. She's Developer Advocate at GitLab, and Fatima is here to walk us through this brand new GitLab report, and we'll be breaking down some of the most compelling and potentially provocative even findings about what's inside. So Fatima, let's go ahead and dive right in. Welcome to the show.

**Fatima** (1:02)
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Andrew. It's always great to hang out with you.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:05)
Amazing. Well, without any further to do, let's talk a little bit about this report. So what's it called and what do we learn from it?

**Fatima** (1:13)
Yeah. So this is a research report called The Economics of Software Innovation, and it was this global survey of C-level executives about AI, how much money they're spending on AI, how much adoption they're having with AI, and thinking about how humans are learning with AI, the governance of it, and strategic things across their organizations. It's a whopping 40-page PDF. And so, together, Andrew and I have pulled together a few stats that we thought would be interesting to talk about on the show.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:42)
Yes. Well, great. That's great framing, and we're going to include links to this report, so folks can go check it out. As you know, our Dev Interrupted listeners, we've been covering these kinds of stories for a while, looking at surveys from all across the industry. So I'm really excited to get GitLab's perspective here. So let's just dive into one of the first things that stood out. Fatima, you want to talk about it?

**Fatima** (2:00)
Yeah. I thought this one was interesting. And so the report talks about how executives want to see a 50-50 human and AI partnership when building things. And currently, they've assessed it to be 75% human and 25% AI. But they're saying the ideal balance is this 50-50. And in my experience, I've seen the 75-25. I would say it's even less than 25 And I don't know if 50-50 is something to aspire towards. I kind of disagree with this.

**Andrew Zigler** (2:31)
I do as well, because also 50-50 in terms of work split feels very arbitrary, because a huge amount of that work could be toil, that could be freed up even more by the AI, right? But let's say that the AI does 75, even more percent of the work, and there's less for the humans to do. That doesn't mean that what the humans are doing is less valuable or less critical. And if you were to try to delegate some of that to AI, it could cause major issues. I can think of a lot of industries where aiming for a 50-50 split feels really arbitrary. So that's kind of an interesting finding in terms of the balance.

**Fatima** (3:09)
Absolutely. Even if you're thinking specifically about software as an industry, and a lot of the use cases that we have for AI and LLMs right now with turning SPAC into a starter project or debugging or researching, I can't imagine that 50 percent of your role as a senior software engineer can be done that way without some level of management of the AI. And so maybe this number is indicating 50 percent of your time is going to be managing a set of agents, and the other 50 percent of your time. And the report talks about how human creativity, human vision, human collaboration can't ever go away. And so maybe that's the split, but I'm not totally sold on this stat just yet.

**Andrew Zigler** (3:53)
Yeah. I guess we'll have to see what develops. You know, what else stood out from you in here?

**Fatima** (3:58)
Another one that I thought, and it's funny because I'm pulling the things that I don't quite agree with. So there's a lot of other great stats in the report, so people should totally go and check those out. Some of those are highlighted on the website, so you don't necessarily have to download the report to see them. But I pulled out the ones that I thought we'd disagree with, because I think that's where the fun is. And so 94 percent of executives say that AI will pay for itself in two years, is the other stat.