Improving Developer Productivity with AI Coding Assistants

The Cloudcast

Keri Olson (@ksolson20, VP AI for Code at @IBM) talks about coding assistants across the software development lifecycle, the future of agents, and domain-specific assistants.
SHOW: 869
SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #869 Transcript
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• IBM Watsonx Code Assistant (homepage)
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Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background, and then give us a little bit of background on where you focus your time at IBM these days?
Topic 2 - Developer code assistants have become one of the most popular areas of GenAI usage. At a high level, how mature are the technologies that augment developers today?
Topic 3 - Software development has an entire lifecycle (Generate, Complete, Explain, Test, Transform, Document). It’s easy for developers to just plug in a service, but is that often the most effective way to start using GenAI in the software development lifecycle?
Topic 4 - Software developers are notoriously picky about what tools they use and how they use them. GenAI doesn’t “guarantee” outputs. Are there concerns that if different developers or groups use different coding assistants, that it could create more challenges than it helps?
Topic 5 - What is a holistic way to think about code assistants? How much should be actively engaged with developers, how much should be behind the scenes, how much will be automated or agentic in the future?
Topic 6 - In the past, we essentially had “real developers” (people who wrote code) and things like Low-Code for “citizen developers” on process tasks. Do you expect to see code assistants bringing more powerful skills to people that previously hadn’t identified as a real developer? (e.g. the great idea on a napkin that turns into a mobile app)

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