Simplifying the AI Stack | IBM's Dr. Maryam Ashoori

**Andrew Zigler** (0:06)
Welcome to Dev Interrupted, everyone. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler. Joining me today, as you know, is fellow host, Dan Lines, co-founder and COO of Linear B. Always great to have you here, Dan.

**Dan Lines** (0:18)
Yeah, awesome to be on. Thanks, man.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:20)
Of course. You know, listeners, we have a great episode in store for you today. It's featuring a conversation with Dr. Maryam Ashoori. She's the head of product for Watson X AI at IBM. She had a lot of really great insights on how AI is reshaping engineering work and I'm really excited to share them. But before we get there, you know, Dan, I know you've listened to Dr. Ashoori's conversation and you have a lot of insights too in your role at Linear B about how AI is reshaping engineering work.

**Dan Lines** (0:49)
Yeah, absolutely. I would say I talk AI. So maybe per week, I'm meeting with 10 customers or prospects that are utilizing Linear B and we talk AI probably eight out of 10 times, nine out of 10 times. So like absolutely, I think it's top of mind for everybody.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:10)
Yeah, unavoidable and unavoidable topic for sure. It's really hard for it to not come up anywhere. Sometimes when you have a conversation, AI doesn't come up and it becomes a delight or a rarity these days, right? Let's dig into some of that, some of what Maryam is going to be talking about, about how particularly how AI is going to be impacting the developer experience and developer productivity, and how AI is ultimately shaping the skills that developers need to be picking up in order to be more effective and to get their work done. I wanted to get a sense of how does that line up with things that you see when you talk with engineering teams and you see how they're realigning?

**Dan Lines** (1:48)
First of all, what she was saying was very interesting, but I can just give my perspective and I'll give it from two different ways. So one is I'm talking to developer experience teams. So you got developers and you got DevEx teams. DevEx teams know that they should be or need to be using AI to gain productivity for the business. So that's understood now. Okay, that's my mission. I need to use this AI in some way, shape or form for my developers. But also what I'm hearing is it's still fairly unknown or unproven. They're having a hard time saying it definitely is improving productivity or not. So for example, the last customer that I talked to about it was like two days ago. They're like, yeah, we rolled out like co-pilot to the entire engineering organization, did a survey of the teams, like asked people. And it was like one team said, okay, I think it's effective and most of the team said, I don't know yet.
And so I think that's what DevX teams are facing, kind of like, hey, I know I need to be using this stuff. I know it needs to drive productivity. I'm unsure if it is or not. So that's one problem to solve. But I think the other thing about it, and I know that we'll get into it, is like being more, I think, intentional and specific about how it's going to make you productive. From the developer side, I'm also hearing a range of things. Like we rolled some out at Linear B. We rolled out our AI code review to our developers. Some of the feedback is like amazing. Hey, we need to do this AI code review everywhere. It's already finding bugs and stuff. Like we should keep it. And then other times, like you might hear, okay, it still needs a little bit of work. Like it suggests it's, you know, something different or wrong, right? So it's kind of like still in the work. The most advanced thing that I've seen is we had a developer that's actually like managing a team of AI bots. So it's like, okay, now I'm a developer and I have three bots that are like getting the story done or the issue done. I have one creating tasks, I have one writing code, I have one QA-ing. So I know that sounds like a little bit advanced, but I think like for developers, there's a big range right now of where do you fall? Are you like commanding a team of bots? Are you still learning like prompts and that kind of stuff? So yeah, that's what I see in the field.

**Andrew Zigler** (4:24)
I completely resonate with that. That's what I hear from folks as well when they talk about the folks that are really getting ahead, that are utilizing this to kind of get ahead in their productivity. They're splitting their work into a bunch of little agents, a bunch of little workflows, but most importantly, they're managing those outputs. They're being in charge of the decisions and the information that goes into them, but they're not spending as much of the time doing, which is what Dr. Ashoori, she really focuses on in our conversation, is that shift from being the doer to the decision maker, the decision manager, and how AI can give you that focus, you know?