Where does the next phase of AI-assistants for software development go next? Is it an evolution of developer productivity, or a complete rethinking of the barriers and limitations for broader software development?

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WHERE DO AI DEVELOPER-ASSISTANTS GO NEXT?

• A year ago it felt like co-pilots were one of the entry point use-cases for AI.
• Since then we’ve seen numbers say the uplift is 10-20% productivity.
• Microsoft claims that 20-30% of their code is now written by AIs.
• We’ve seen many senior developers speakout that it’s not replacement level technology and they don’t trust it.
• Companies like Cursor have a $9-10B valuation. Windsurf just got purchased for $3B by OpenAI.
• Microsoft has Co-Pilot (based on OpenAI models). Google and Amazon are rumored to be launching their own.
• Lots of companies are launching agents (IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.), and lots of agent frameworks now exist.
• So where does it go next? Is it just wide-spead adoption of developer productivity?
  • Is it specialized functions within developer workflows? (e.g. CI/CD, documentation, security evaluations, bug fixes, long-term maintenance, etc.)
  • How far are we from teams being just a few architects, leads, Sr. Devs, and then teams of AI’s (agents, etc.)?
    • Is that a good thing for Sr. Dev personalities that didn’t want to focus on soft-skills?
    • Does that allow for greater experimentation against feature-requests or stories, since they can create more, test more, etc.?
    • Do we start to see companies create skunkworks teams/groups that try to adopt this approach?
    • Are product managers ready to have zero-backlogs and the demand for new ideas to increase?

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