How AI is changing the role of enterprise developers [Q&A]

Artificial intelligence is making its way into many areas of business and IT. Software development is just one area where it's starting to have a major impact on productivity and working patterns.

To learn more we spoke to Varun Mohan, CEO of AI coding assistant Codeium, which uses proprietary large language models (LLMs) to aid with software development and has recently announced a $65 million funding round.

BN: What challenges do enterprises have currently when it comes to developing software?

VM: There is a push towards digital acceleration to boost business agility and efficiency, yet the world is suffering from 'software starvation.' In other words, demand for innovative software solutions far outpaces the actual market supply and/or the capacity for large enterprises to develop solutions in-house.

There's a mismatch between what companies want to achieve, which is many things, and actual execution. Just look at the backlogs of JIRA from most companies and you'll immediately notice this gap. This isn't for a lack of imagination but rather a reflection of the constraints they face in turning these visions into reality.

Many CIOs I speak to echo this sentiment. The issue at hand isn't about adding more developers, however, but about strategically accelerating the business to stay ahead of the competition. This means shifting how developers are utilized within companies to make them more productive and efficient. It's about enabling the existing workforce to undertake more 'high leverage' activities.

This would require better allocation of developer time and skills towards more strategic projects, rather than being bogged down by low-value activities. We also find that junior developers can be onboarded faster and bug senior developers less, and those 10x developers can be spent building more products.

This is in essence why we built Codeium to begin with. We want to help these companies empower their developers. We enhance productivity and efficiency for developers by accelerating coding processes.

In the end, it's a win-win: the developers are happier because they get work on more interesting projects, and the company gets more value out of their work.

BN: There is a co-pilot for everything these days. Is this helping overcome development challenges?

VM: To some degree, yes, but the technology is still rapidly improving and not all use cases have caught up yet. The industry should think about co-pilots as helping automate routine tasks to save time, like an assistant. You shouldn't be using these things yet to completely automate everything. That includes generating code, you should still have a human in the loop review suggestions.

The main function that co-pilots today lack is personalization. Personalization means adapting each user's or organization's specific coding practices, preferences, and the technical stack they operate within. This means we can tailor suggestions, code completions, and other features based on the unique data and patterns of the organization or individual.

For instance, if a company predominantly uses a certain programming language or framework, Codeium has built-in context awareness and optimizations for those technologies. This approach extends to integrating with various source code management tools and environments, ensuring seamless operation regardless of the users' existing infrastructure. Personalization also manifests through supporting specific tools, like Jupyter Notebooks for data scientists, as an example.

This all means companies can enable their best engineers to do high-value work. They can write more software and provide more value to the company by spending more time doing the things that they actually like doing, which is building products, not writing boilerplate code.

Codeium is adept at providing this level of personalization, and we are continuously building on this foundation to make it even ‘smarter’ for developers.

BN: Is AI changing the role of human developers in the process?

VM: Yes, but as I said previously, we have a way to go.

We've all seen movies where an individual suddenly gains a superpower and must learn to control it. You can think of AI, and Codeium, as a superpower engineers can wield very effectively, but the superpower never replaces them. For example, right now on average Codeium generates over 45 percent of all net new code for our customers. It's definitely a massive help and accelerating development right now.

In the end, Codeium dramatically increases the engineers' abilities and efficiency. It makes their day more enjoyable and satisfying. Developers will write more and better code to fill a never-ending need, and it will just keep getting better.

BN: What do developers need from coding productivity tools to solve their development challenges?

VM: The first is adaptability; the tools need to be personalized according to an organization's private data and workflows, ensuring that the platform not only integrates seamlessly into existing processes but also optimizes them.

Also, the security of IP is absolutely critical for an enterprise. Self-hosting capabilities can address their needs for security, customization, and control of data -- especially for those wary of external managed services' potential vulnerabilities. This can also reduce cost in the long run as it minimizes the need for expensive hardware through a GPU-light experience and avoids the recurring fees typical of cloud services, making it an economically sensible solution for large-scale enterprises.

Lastly, the tools should have extensive feature sets, which support a wide array of programming languages, development environments, and specialized tools like Jupyter Notebooks, ensuring it meets the diverse needs of different departments within an organization. This level of support not only streamlines various development tasks but also enhances productivity across the board.

This is precisely why Codeium is an indispensable tool for enterprises seeking to maintain control over their development infrastructure while leveraging advanced code acceleration capabilities, and the reason it's seen so much traction in such little time.

Codeium is already actively used by over 500,000 developers. But the success doesn’t just lie in the numbers. Large companies like Dell, Anduril and Clearwater Analytics swear by us.

These have emphasized Codeium's value within their software development lifecycle, and have also expressed the enthusiasm among their developers. Whether you're a single indie developer, or someone writing complex enterprise software, Codieum provides value across the board.

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