If you’re a developer, there’s a good chance you’ve experimented with coding assistants like GitHub Copilot. Many developers have even fully integrated these tools into their workflows. One way these tools accelerate development is by autocompleting entire blocks of code. The AI achieves this by having awareness of the surrounding code. It understands context. However, in many cases the context available to an AI is limited. This restricts the AI’s ability to suggest more sweeping changes to a codebase, or even to refactor an entire application.

Quinn Slack is the CEO of Sourcegraph. He is now hard at work on the challenge of giving more context to AI – to make it aware of entire codebases, dependencies, error logs, and other data. Quinn joins the show today to talk about what it takes to move beyond code autocomplete, how to develop the next generation of coding AI, and what the future looks like for software engineers and programming languages.