AI vs software devs
Daniel and Chris are out this week, so we’re bringing you conversations all about AI’s complicated relationship to software developers from other Changelog pods: JS Party, Go Time & The Changelog.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
José Valim: No, not really, in the sense that I consider myself very lucky, very fortunate, or whatever; or blessed, however you want to say it. I’m not being overconfident here, but more like thankful that I think whatever happens to me, it’s going to be fine. I truly believe that what’s going to make Elixir survive is the community, more than whatever technological changes… Unless there’s something very drastic.
[52:18] I talked to my father about this, about investments. So when Bitcoin wasn’t that crazy, and then my father is like “Oh, have you heard about this thing, that if you put your money there, people got this huge return?” And then I always told him “Father, if we got to know about it, it’s because it’s too late.” Or if something happens, it’s like “Oh, father, if something happens, it’s because – if something goes this bad, it’s because it’s going to be bad for everybody. So don’t try to fight it.”
So again, unless there’s a very major change, I think I’ll be fine. So I’m not worried about me, in the sense I always think more about – it’s more about ideals. Again, I like to say, well, me 10 years ago - that’s where my trepidation is if things go closed source… And those things, they happen by – we don’t see the results. I think another polemic topic about this, it’s like “Hey, I use Chrome. As soon as Chrome came out, I immediately –” Today I don’t use Chrome anymore. But as soon as Chrome came out, I immediately swapped to Chrome. And if I had known that this would lead to a point where Google is in this position where it has a lot of control over the browser, over the web, and over how we use the internet, 10 years ago I would probably not have used Chrome, if I could have seen it. So I think that’s where my trepidation comes from, of things being closed source. The developer experience…
Another example today – Elixir was the first programming language that GitHub had the new code navigation things that were provided by the community. So there were some programming languages, and there still are, where they have very good navigation and exploration on GitHub UI. And the path for that, to get that feature, to get that behavior was - and I’m very thankful that the GitHub team, they discussed with us and allowed us to do that… But that’s closed source. And GitHub plays a major role over how developers use.
So it all comes back to this idea of if you want to provide a good experience for your users, how much of that is behind something closed source that you have no control, and you are depending on somebody paying attention to you, or you having a contact, or me having a name, because I was very active in the Rails community that GitHub uses like 10 years ago? Those are the things that – but I feel lucky, but it worries me. How much is being closed? How much is going to be out of our control? And then the trepidation, I guess, is “What does that matter for the small José out there, who wants to start building his thing today, and they won’t be able to?”