What if you could get instant feedback on your code?

Over the past 2-3 years the question on the mind of every engineering manager, leader, and executive has been “how much faster can AI make my developers?” Or, more controversially, “can AI replace them altogether?” The answer to these questions, like so many other hotly-debated engineering discussions over the years is “it depends.”

If the question is “can AI replace my senior engineers?” the answer so far is unequivocally “no.” Today's AI coding assistants aren't yet a silver bullet that can magically give a team of 50 engineers the output of a team of 100. While GitHub estimates that engineers using Copilot complete tasks 55% faster, so far it's only helping them to create 8.7% more pull requests. Furthermore, AI code generation tools today are limited by the context they can take in about the codebase, the company's engineering practices, and historical architecture and implementation decisions. It’s currently not, and likely won't be a replacement for senior developer talent anytime soon. However, this doesn’t mean that today's AI coding tools are worthless; they just have to be applied to the right tasks.

A recent GitHub developer survey estimated that upwards of 82% of developers are currently using AI (defined as ”any developer tools that use generative AI and LLMs to provide engineering assistance throughout the software development cycle”) both in and outside of work. So what are they using it for?

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