According to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke , who spoke to TechCentral at the Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town last week, AI development tools are not only boosting productivity for professional developers but also making code more accessible to students, hobbyists and even children who want to learn to code.
"We have set ourselves the aspiration of growing from just over 100 million to helping a billion humans become software developers," said Dohmke.
"That does not mean they all become professional software developers in the same way that not every child that learns music, art and physics in school becomes a musician, an artist or a physicist. Coding is a form of literacy, and I think everybody should have the fundamental skills to create software."
As a Microsoft subsidiary, GitHub played a big role in the development of Microsoft's AI tool, dubbed Copilot, which is based on OpenAI's large language models. Microsoft has invested US13-billion in OpenAI since 2019.
"Moving from one team to another, or from one company to another, happens often in the software space. Sometimes within the same project there are dependencies on other code that also need to be understood. With AI, you can basically look at the code base, have it explained to you, navigate it and understand how it is designed," said Dohmke.
