The future of AI in software development | Inbal Shani (CPO of GitHub)

**Inbal Shani** (0:00)
The user of the AI tools to develop software needs to form a different thinking. You need to start figuring out how are you using these AI tools to help you be successful. And it's no longer just the actual code writing, it's really evolving your thinking to the big picture, to the connected experience, to connected systems, which today, we just find it more in the world of more senior developers and less and less in the junior developers. The junior developers, when they start, usually we expect them to be able to write simple code. But if now there is an AI assistant that is helping them write in code, they can spend more time from the get-go understanding the system, understanding the environment that they are building or understanding that product that they're building, which today they don't have time because they are still learning how to code.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:46)
Today, my guest is Inbal Shani. Inbal is Chief Product Officer at GitHub, formerly a General Manager at AWS and at Microsoft, and also Senior Software Developer on Amazon Robotics. In our conversation, we explore the end state of Copilot and AI-based tooling for software engineers, what the future of software development looks like with AI, what's underhyped and overhyped in AI and software development, what metrics the teams look at to understand if Copilot is doing its job, what mistakes teams and companies make jumping into AI, the design philosophy of Copilot, plus what's helped Inbal most become the leader she is today, and also where GitHub is heading as a product and an organization. With that, I bring you Inbal Shani, after a short word from our sponsors.
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Inbal, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Inbal Shani** (4:22)
Awesome. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:24)
I want to start with just a broad question about where software development is going. It feels like you're at the center of the storm of what is changing in software development. It almost feels like GitHub kicked off the storm with the launch of Copilot.