Thomas Dohmke

So what do companies do?

They divide and conquer and they assign subsystems to individual teams.

And that's, in some ways, the funny thing about software development is that

What you learn in school and university is the basics.

And then what you really learn is the craft, your journey.

When you come into a company, you realize you almost never get to start a new project and start from scratch.

You almost always, you know, get to maintain somebody else's work.

There are still many financial services companies that run on COBOL, which is a very old programming language that was invented when Eisenhower was the president in the United States.

It runs on mainframes, which is a technology that was the state of the art in 1975.

that still runs, right?

And somebody has to maintain that.

So we are, I think what you're saying is absolutely true.

We're already at the state where a single person often cannot explain all the different parts of the system.

And so AI actually gets us closer to that state again, because now you can just, you know, ask Copilot, you know, where in my code base is the feature implemented?

What does this method do?

What does that method in COBOL or the struct look like in a more modern language like Java or Python?

And so you can do these transformations.

You have an agent, a coding agent that's always available to you.

And, you know, this week at our build conference here in Seattle, we announced the coding agent and co-pilot where you take an issue literally like a human language description and the agent does all the work in the background and submits a pull request.

Now, I get that pull request.