2964: Innovating with AI: Maintaining the Human Touch in Software Development

[00:00:00] What if the key to becoming a successful coder isn't just mastering the latest programming language but also includes studying other humanities subjects like philosophy for example? Well in today's episode I want to explore the unexpected skills that make developers stand out in the age of AI.

[00:00:23] Joining me today is Rob Whiteley, CEO of Coda, a company revolutionising developer tools and environments. But today, Rob will be bringing with him unique perspectives on why soft skills might just be as crucial as technical expertise, especially in today's rapidly evolving tech landscape.

[00:00:46] Which begs the question, are we on the brink of a paradigm shift in how we train and value A big shout out to my sponsor today, whose support allows me to bring you quality interviews every single day of the year.

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[00:02:23] Buckle up and hold on tight as I beam your ears all the way to California where Rob is waiting to share his insights. So a massive warm welcome to the show, Rob. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:02:39] Yeah, thanks Neil. My name is Rob Whiteley. I'm the CEO of Coder, which is a software company based out of Austin, Texas. And I'm here in beautiful sunny California. Wow, I'm officially jealous of you being in sunny California.

[00:02:53] Our summer's not so great here in the UK and I'm looking forward to finding out a lot more information about Coder. But before I do, I just wanted to check in with you here on a few things that I've been reading about recently.

[00:03:05] What are your thoughts on Marco Argenti's recommendation for AI engineers to study philosophy? How do you think that approach can improve the quality of code? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this one. Yeah, it's a really interesting take. I think it is directionally correct.

[00:03:22] I don't know if I necessarily agree with philosophy per se. But I do like the concept that developers need a broader, more liberal arts based education and viewpoint. And I think what spurred him on to make that claim, which I very much agree with, is we

[00:03:45] are on the cusp of a transformation. And I hate using that term because it's overused in our industry. But the literal definition of something will be dramatically different after then we are in that transformation. That's what AI and generative AI or gen AI will do.

[00:04:04] And so I think if I put myself in the shoes of a developer, my life yesterday was I got instructions from my team or a team lead or from the planning process. I executed a task as an individual contributor and then I contribute that piece back to the

[00:04:27] whole. But I think in the future, after gen AI, I'm going to outsource all that to a code generation tool. And so really my role is more of almost a virtual team lead. I'm looking after a small team of bots that are doing the coding for me.

[00:04:46] And so suddenly I went from individual contributor to essentially a leader or a manager of sorts. And it's just a completely different skill set and one that requires more of a soft skills background.

[00:04:59] And that, to me, is what rings a little bit of philosophy or pick your other favorite communication or more history based type education. Well, let's expand on that belief that a developer will benefit from broader liberal arts

[00:05:15] viewpoints. As CEO of Coda, what qualities do you think are essentially in a coder beyond technical expertise, especially in this age of AI that we're talking about? Yeah, I think what first of all, what I always value the most is creative problem solving.

[00:05:36] So problem solving can come from a whole. Broad range of backgrounds, engineering, math, physics, science, but I put creative in front of it because I don't think we're in a place where there's always one way to solve

[00:05:53] every problem. And so being that we're a software company, being that innovation is kind of the currency that we trade in, we need to solve them in a novel way. And so I think that's where you get a broader viewpoint, thinking outside the box a

[00:06:09] little bit. I don't think generative AI is there yet. I don't think it is a particularly creative tool, minus some hallucinations from time to time. It's more of a task oriented, execution oriented. So I still need that creative part, the art versus the science.

[00:06:29] So that's what I think we look for first and foremost. But another thing that we look for is just good communication. We are a distributed company. We have a few touch points in key offices, but really most people work remote.

[00:06:44] And so in order for everything to work, you have to be very crisp and clear in how you communicate. And I think that has been an underappreciated skill in tech in general, but software engineers in particular.

[00:07:00] And so that is if I had to rank my top two, it would be creativity and communication. 100 percent with you. And I also think that diversity of thought to solve complex problems is so important and

[00:07:11] also crucial for any business that's serious about serving effectively a diverse set of customers. So how can organisations, do you think, better balance that need for speed in coding with the importance of producing high quality, effective results and solving real

[00:07:29] problems? Yeah, I think first and foremost, the talent war has been very intense over the last couple of years. What I mean by that is the need for software engineering is true. I mean, if I had to invoke another buzzword of digital business, pretty much every

[00:07:51] company now needs to employ some degree of software engineering to compete in the digital realm. And so when you have every company on the planet competing for what is still a relatively small population of people, it is very difficult.

[00:08:07] And so I do think you need to be a little bit more creative in the way you target. So, for example, and I won't go deep on Coder, but we are an open source project at heart. We do sell a commercial version, but we're open source.

[00:08:22] And so that gives us a tremendous footprint in terms of people that engage with our technology. And so to some extent, that is our job board. People who are already engaging and showing curiosity with our project are going to be

[00:08:37] the folks that exhibit the kind of domain knowledge we need. And so now we're just testing for those soft skills. And so to some extent, I think GitHub is the future LinkedIn in terms of software

[00:08:49] developers. It is where you put your resume because it's where you indicate all of your work and code and sort of advertise yourself, if you will. And so that's just something we've had to do to get creative. We can't go through the necessarily the typical job application process.

[00:09:07] And a few moments ago, we talked about the importance of so-called soft skills such as critical thinking, creativity, human understanding, communication and the role that that plays in the development of successful coders.

[00:09:19] But I suppose on behalf of every business leader or manager of a team out there that might be listening to our conversation, how can these skills be better cultivated in an organization? I don't think we've cracked the nut.

[00:09:35] I'll certainly give you my experience with a little bit of a caveat that your mileage may vary. I think for me, the most important thing is safety, psychological safety, the ability to experiment.

[00:09:55] So we have a bunch of cultural values here at Coder and one of them we have is always Tinker. And what we mean by Tinker is experiment, try new things. And the reason why I think that's so important is because the act of tinkering is

[00:10:11] creative. It's trying to solve a problem in a unique way. The encouragement of it encourages me to communicate it. Here's what I'm trying to do and why. If I fail, that's fine. We actually reward failure.

[00:10:27] The only thing I ask is that you tell me what you learned and share those learning. So now I'm practicing the communication muscle. And so I think you need to have that tiny entrepreneurial spark that you're trying to create. And then the other thing, so that's one.

[00:10:47] Two, you need a rich reward system or recognition system. And I'm not talking money. In fact, most developers are more motivated by peer recognition, I think, than pure dollars. And so one of the things that you need is some sort of genuine, authentic

[00:11:08] recognition system where a peer can recognize another peer for great work. And I think that helps foster some of those leadership like skills, because to me, it's really important to make the distinction between a leader and a manager.

[00:11:26] Managers have teams under them or people under them, leader, and they are usually a leader. But a leader doesn't necessarily have to have a team. You could be an individual contributor and still be seen as a leader or a thought leader.

[00:11:40] And so to me, that's important to make sure that you have those kind of organic recognition platforms as well. And I'm curious, in your opinion, what would you say are the additional subjects that maybe a wannabe coder, student coder or even experienced coder want into future proof their

[00:11:58] careers? What additional subjects should they be studying to become more well-rounded professionals in today's increasingly AI driven world? Yeah, I think so. For first and foremost, writing, communicating English or whatever your preferred language is. I think those are going to be some of the most critical skills.

[00:12:20] When I was in university all those years ago, I chose an engineering degree simply because it had the fewest number of language requirements of any degree. So that was probably not the smartest way to choose your major, kids, if you're listening to me.

[00:12:41] In hindsight, that was a mistake. Writing, communicating language is probably the tool that is used the most in the business world today. And how you communicate, how you use and motivate things and people is probably going to measure the biggest impact you can make for your organization.

[00:13:02] And even if you're thinking to yourself, no, I'm just going to gladly manage an army of generative AI bots. Well, guess what? You got a right to it. It's still a chat bot. How you communicate with it, how clearly you communicate will affect its

[00:13:17] outcome. And so first and foremost, I think all of the subject matters around communication matter a lot. The second thing is don't lose the science of it all. Even if you're outsourcing coding, I still think you need to understand the basics

[00:13:36] of it. So understanding computer science, understanding some of the computer and electrical engineering, I think it's still important to understand how things work in order to get effective. So the subject of today and I think the blog post that brought this all was sort of an

[00:13:52] over indexing on the softer skills. But I don't think you get to skip the hard skills, at least if you want to be able to improve the output of your tooling. So those to me would be, I think, the beginning as you progress.

[00:14:09] Certainly, I think we're becoming more and more geared towards more economy, economics principles, business principles. I don't have an opinion on whether things like an MBA are going to be critical moving forward, but I think those are where we're beginning to see a little bit of shift in

[00:14:28] terms of the types of skills we're looking for in our more senior staff, at least. And if we were to look internally at your work there, how does Coda support the development of well-rounded, experienced coders who maybe possess both technical knowledge and essential soft skills?

[00:14:48] Anything you can share around that? Yeah, certainly. So we're in a bit of an interesting position in that Coder in and of itself is a developer productivity tool. So I won't bore you with the exact specifics, but the basic idea

[00:15:05] is the developer spends less time battling his or her development environment and more time in coding in their IDE, actually forming the key output we want from them, which is the code base. And so in order to encourage folks to be

[00:15:25] more well-rounded, you have to take something off their plate. Otherwise it becomes 110, 120 percent requirement of do your job and develop it outside of normal working hours. And so our philosophy is, well, if I can give you 20 percent of your time back, 30

[00:15:42] percent of your time back by making the actual function of coding and developing easier, then we ask that you invest that. And so we make it available for all employees to do continuous learning and development, whether that's online or in person, going to key events.

[00:16:01] And so we're always encouraging folks to broaden their skill set, learn from others, rotate into a different skill. Like, for example, one of the things I'm most proud about our engineers is they are so customer focused. All of them are on customer calls solving customer problems.

[00:16:20] And so they learn how to communicate and how to follow up and how to follow through. And so to me, that is possible because we first take away some of the mundane tasks so that they're freed up to spend more time on the higher value tasks.

[00:16:38] And I'm also curious, what kind of challenges do you possibly see arising from the reliance on AI to speed up coding processes? I know in so many different areas, whether it be writing or coding, some say heavy usage

[00:16:51] can make you more reliant on AI, even lazy in some cases. So anything you're seeing here and how some of these challenges might be mitigated? Yeah, I think we're at a point now where I think generative AI produces a good output, but not a great

[00:17:11] output. And companies don't compete in the market on good. I think they compete on great. And so that human is still needed for that last 20 percent, whether it's the polishing of the output, the checking of it to make sure it's logically accurate, finding some way to differentiate it,

[00:17:32] finding an iteration loop with the chat bot so that you can kind of push it and iterate, iterate, iterate. So to me, the biggest challenge is not assuming that the output is good to go. It may be syntactically correct, but that doesn't mean it's elegant

[00:17:53] or innovative or unique. And so I think that human element is still needed. And so it's almost a quality assurance role rather than a pure development role. So I think that's one challenge. I think the other challenge is, and this is one that I

[00:18:13] don't think we're expending enough time as an industry exploring, which is what are the intellectual property rights? If I am now co-developing code with a tool, do I own that code? Does it co-own that code with me? Has the supplier of that tool signed rights to me or

[00:18:36] indemnified me? So there's a lot of gray intellectual property rights that I think we're just beginning to understand. And unfortunately, in an industry where the tool set is moving so quickly, it varies based on not only what tool you're using, but what version of the tool

[00:18:55] and what different tools within certain vendors even have different rules. And so it's the wild, wild west. And I do think companies need to have somebody who looks at the compliance elements of this.

[00:19:10] Absolutely. And as we record this podcast today, I think it was a couple of days ago that Microsoft AI CEO even made questionable claims about copyright and online content, saying web content is freeware for training AI. Did you see that?

[00:19:24] I did. I did. So, yeah, I mean, that's exactly the debate. And again, we're an open source technology. And so we're putting our code base out there. But it really kind of gets gray in terms of is that code based training, for example, we're on GitHub.

[00:19:42] Am I training copilot to on my code base? It gets pretty squirrely. And I think we're going to see the next year or two have a couple of landmark, unfortunately, lawsuits that will probably help disambiguate this a little

[00:19:56] bit. But we're sort of in a leap and then look period in time. And so that's what I think is happening. And that's fine. I don't think it's putting anybody at mortal risk, but it is definitely, I think, going to put a few businesses at financial risk.

[00:20:14] And of course, that's why there's so many big talking points around responsible AI ethics governance around AI. So with all that side of things in mind, how do you think studying things like philosophy and other humanities subjects can help coders address

[00:20:29] some of those ethical considerations in AI that we're talking about when using AI for technology development? Yeah. And that's where I think sort of the low key brilliance in suggesting philosophy in particular from Marco was interesting because it's I know I can, but should I?

[00:20:50] It is an ethical question of just because I can produce this or I can take the shortcut or I can get to a particular place doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do. And so unfortunately, you have to think about the right thing along the dimension of

[00:21:05] the right thing for my customer, the right thing for my company, the right thing for the industry. And so it's not a straightforward set of problems. It's very, very multidimensional. And so I think philosophy and teaching kind of a basic skill set of processing ethics is

[00:21:26] is critical as well as that fundamental problem solving. If I decide a particular path should be closed to me for ethical reasons, then I have to have another path. And so to me, but that is a skill set I think we've underappreciated or invested in in tech.

[00:21:45] In tech, I think the assumption was ask for forgiveness, not permission. And now I think we do need individual contributors to start maybe thinking about not asking for permission, but deciding if it is a permissive thing to do before they just plow ahead.

[00:22:04] And I love the line you use there of I know I could, but should I? And I think that's such an important point. And the fact that you said that suggests to me that you've had a good background

[00:22:13] and you've had more than a few stories in the industry. And of course, none of us are able to achieve any degree of success without a little help along the way. Very often we find a mentor in the most unlikeliest place.

[00:22:25] Someone sees something and maybe invests a little time or just has an impact on us. I've got to ask, was there a particular person that you're grateful towards when you look back at someone that maybe impacted you or helped you get you

[00:22:37] where you are? I'd love to give them a shout out today if there is. Yeah, and I sincerely hope she's listening. Her name is Ellen Daly. And this was back when I worked in the Boston area at a company called Forrester.

[00:22:50] And she was my manager and went on to be a key leader inside of Forrester. And the reason why I want to briefly kind of pause on her and give her a quick shout out when I was coming up through the ranks, and I hate to date myself,

[00:23:06] but let's just say the early 2000s. I think there was a little bit of a turning point where how you led was important as the outcome that you achieved. And what Ellen really taught me is that you can be an effective leader

[00:23:24] and still be a good fundamental person who understands right and wrong, who understands how to communicate and how to motivate. And so that really, really shaped how I wanted to become a leader over time. I don't know if I can swear on this, so I'll just say A-holes.

[00:23:42] I think we talk a lot about in the industry, a no A-holes policy, but very few leaders actually know how to walk that walk. And Ellen certainly taught me that. Fantastic. What a big shout out to Ellen Daly there.

[00:23:57] And I think it's so important to recognize the people that have that impact on us and point us in the right direction. So a big shout out to Ellen. And for anybody interested in carrying on this conversation we started today

[00:24:09] or even just exploring and learning a little bit more about Coder, where would you like to point everyone listening? Yeah, so certainly Coder.com is where you can learn a lot more about the company and the product.

[00:24:21] And then if you're more of a hands-on person, just go to github.com slash Coder. That's where our code base sits. Well, I love chatting with you today about what organizations should be looking for in coders, in addition to that deep tech knowledge and things like critical thinking,

[00:24:35] creativity, human understanding, communication, and also having that conversation about what coders should be studying up on to be more well-rounded and successful in a time where AI seems like the magic bullet to make any coder build faster, but potentially sacrificing lower quality and less effective results.

[00:24:54] So much gold in your insights here. And just a big thank you, Rob, for taking the time to sit down with me and share some of those stories with me. Yeah, my pleasure. Anytime.

[00:25:04] So a big thank you to Rob for joining me on the podcast today and talking about the importance of a well-rounded education for developers. The delicate balance between AI-assisted coding and human creativity and the critical soft skills that set great coders apart.

[00:25:23] So as AI continues to reshape the coding landscape, one question remains. How will you adapt your skills to stay ahead in this new era of development? As usual, I invite you to share your thoughts, your insights and experiences.

[00:25:38] And you can do that by emailing me, techblogwriter at outlook.com, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram at Neil C. Hughes. Send me a quick DM. Let me know what you thought of today's episode and anything you'd like to add to the conversation or question you'd like to ask me.

[00:25:54] If not, don't worry. I'm going to be back here bright and early. Same time, same place. I'm the guy loitering in your podcast player with another episode ready to go as soon as you open your eyes. So thank you for listening today though.

[00:26:06] And until next time, don't be a stranger.