Who's Coding Now? AI and the Future of Software Development

**Guido Appenzeller** (0:05)
Today, I think AI is not just a higher-level language abstraction or something like that, but could it become one over time?

**Matt Bornstein** (0:11)
That's the question. Do you think yes?

**Guido Appenzeller** (0:13)
I think it could. If I look at a classic, say, compiler design or in programming languages, if I would have LLMs as a tool, I would probably think very differently about how I would build a compiler.

**Yoko Li** (0:26)
Yeah.

**Guido Appenzeller** (0:26)
And I don't think we've seen that work its way through yet, but if I can basically define certain things in human language in an efficient way, and maybe in a sort of tight enough way, I can use this directly as input for a compiler, that could change a lot of things.

**Derek** (0:40)
Thanks for listening to the a16z AI podcast. I'm Derek, and today we have another great episode digging into how generative AI already is and will continue to impact our digital lives. A few weeks ago, we featured a16z partners, Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Yoko Li discussing what's up with AI agents. And we brought them back for this episode to discuss what AI coding tools mean for the future of software development. It is, as you'll hear, a topic that entails so much more than just five coding. The three of them discuss everything from the relative market size for AI-generated code, presumably quite large, for a capability that could juice developer productivity to the tune of trillions of dollars, to how prompt-based programming might affect the value of classical computer science education. This is so much bigger than stack overflow on steroids. So get ready for the full discussion, starting with the question of why coding has become such a big use case for generative AI. After these disclosures. As a reminder, please note that the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.

**Matt Bornstein** (2:00)
We're pretty sure it's the second biggest AI market right now. Correct me, guys, if I'm wrong, but consumer pure chatbot, I think, is number one. And I think coding is number two, just purely looking at the numbers.

**Yoko Li** (2:12)
But consumer is the aggregation of a lot of things.

**Matt Bornstein** (2:15)
Exactly, right.

**Guido Appenzeller** (2:16)
Depends on defined market. I think you can make an argument as the number one, actually, if you look at really homogenous markets.

**Yoko Li** (2:23)
Is coding bigger than companions? I think so, yes.

**Guido Appenzeller** (2:27)
At this point, it is.

**Matt Bornstein** (2:28)
You think so? That'd be interesting.

**Guido Appenzeller** (2:30)
It depends how you classify something like ChatGPT, which to some degree is useful companionship.

**Matt Bornstein** (2:37)
So a large portion of ChatGPT usage, I think, now is companionship.

**Guido Appenzeller** (2:42)
I think that's right, yeah.

**Matt Bornstein** (2:43)
So well, in the end, is a person's motivation greater to build something or to find love? I think it may be neck and neck.
One thing that's very unique about AI coding that's sometimes underappreciated is this was actually an existing behavior in a couple of ways. First, people were already going somewhere to look for help, which we mentioned earlier is Stack Overflow for the most part. So there was already sort of this muscle people were exercising when they hit a problem they couldn't solve to go find the information on the Internet. And this is really just a much better form of that. There are all these jokes that Stack Overflow was actually writing most of the code for the last X number of years. A lot of that may just shift to AI models, right?

**Guido Appenzeller** (3:25)
It's not clear if that was a joke or not.

**Matt Bornstein** (3:27)
Yeah, maybe not a joke. Also, there was this thing called GitHub Copilot, right? They did this really foundational work to start to transition people off of that sort of Stack Overflow use case to using AI models. And I think companies like Cursor have just done a much better job with that now. And so you have this fairly unique thing that you're actually taking advantage of an existing user behavior, an existing market, and selling a great product into it.

**Guido Appenzeller** (3:49)
I think there's one other aspect, which is, look, if you're a developer and you have access to the latest AI technology, the first problem you solve are your own problems. So I think it's developers just, that's the problems they understand best, that's the problems they face every day. And so they build infrastructure for themselves to use.