GitHub CEO lays out the 'key for winning' for software engineers in the age of AI coding tools

• The CEO of GitHub described the "key for winning" when it comes to AI coding tools for software engineers.
• Thomas Dohmke said it's key for an AI agent to write code that the developer can quickly change using their own skills.
• "Being able to pick the agent that provides the best ROI or do it themselves" is vital, he added.

AI coding tools are everywhere. So what's the approach that software engineers should be taking to get the most use out of them?

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke explained what he believes is the "key for winning" in this arena during an episode of "The MAD Podcast with Matt Turck" released Thursday.

"I think the key for winning is to have a continuum where you can have an agent write code for you and submit a pull request, but then if you as a developer see that code and you want to make three quick changes, you've got to be able to take that onto a local machine and just make those changes," Dohmke said.

The worst alternative, he said, is where a developer would be "trying to figure out how do I provide now feedback or prompt to describe in natural language where I already know how to do it in programming language."

Such a situation would be "basically replacing something that I can do in 3 seconds with something that might potentially take 3 minutes or even longer and that's obviously not more productivity, that's less productivity," Dohmke said.

In other words, software developers should be able to augment code generated by AI tools on the fly instead of wasting valuable time directing the AI to make such a change.

"Enabling developers to move between those categories and being able to pick the agent that provides the best ROI or do it themselves, I think that's the key for winning in the next few years," he concluded.

During a recent Q&A session at startup campus Station F at VivaTech in Paris, Dohmke also talked about the buzzy "vibe coding" phenomenon.

OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy coined the term earlier this year to describe heavily leaning on AI tools to write code for you, allowing you to "fully give in to the vibes" and "forget the code even exists," in his words.

Dohmke said in the Q&A that he doesn't think startups can run on vibe coding alone.

A "non-technical founder will find it difficult to build a startup at scale without developers," he said, noting they "can't build a complex system to justify the next round."

"The value of your startup isn't defined by what you can develop using cheap measures," Dohmke said.