YouSaid · the spoken record

Ryan J. Salva

lines on the record: 72
first: 2022-09-04
most recent: 2022-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so what we did is just like the year before that, we had actually created a snapshot of GitHub's public code for what we call the Arctic Code vault, right? Essentially, this is up and like way in the Nortlands of Finland. There's a seed vault. And we were like, you know what? Like seed vaults are really there to preserve the diversity of the world's flora in seeds in case of some crazy, either natural or man-made disaster. But another really important asset to the world is our code, our open source. Like this represents actually a lot of the collective, well, certainly software, if not like intelligence of kind of like the modern world, right? And so we had put this snapshot of public repositories on these slides.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amount of clone requests. And like we're like, oh my gosh, is this like a denial of service attack? How are we going to respond to this? What's going to happen? And we figured out pretty quickly that it was actually open AI. They were cloning all of our repositories to harvest kind of the data out of GitHub. I mean, like it's totally legit practice, but like, you know, it does have a real consequence. And we were able to step in and mitigate it very quickly. There was not a reliability kind of an uptime incident there. But we're like, hey, y'all, like, cool, love this thing. Let's see if we can get that data to you in a more responsible way, in a way that's packaged a little bit more to meet your needs.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of their semantics, right? The number of words, and I put that in scare quotes, as it were, that can be expressed in Python, for example, is much smaller than the English language, which has all sorts of different grammar rules and nouns and verbs, adjectives, adverbs. And so we started to see what it would be like to actually bring code to these large language models. And the way that I actually got introduced to it is kind of funny. Microsoft and OpenAI had this idea. And at the time, one of the teams that I was responsible for was GitHub's infrastructure team, the team responsible for our data centers, our reliability, our uptime. And we noticed one day that we were getting hammered. I mean, absolutely hammered with a tremendous.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. What a long and, I don't know, depending upon your point of view, sordid or exciting story. So, Microsoft and OpenAI have been collaborating for quite a while now on large language models, making its way into kind of all different experiments and different parts of both Microsoft's software portfolio, as well as just kind of helping open AI by providing the compute necessary. It takes massive amounts of compute to train these models. And they were mostly large language models. And so a couple of years ago now, it kind of dawned on us that, well, language models aren't just English and Spanish and German and Korean and Japanese, right? But Python and JavaScript and Java and C sharp and clojure, all of these are languages too. In fact, they're kind of nice from an AI perspective because they're relatively constrained.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, and that's the thing, like copilot is particularly good, not just at taking away some of the effort, but often, you know, there's learning a new language. And then there's also just waiting into a code base that you're not necessarily familiar with, right? Like, I mean, heck, sometimes I don't recognize some of the code that I wrote six months ago or a year ago. It feels like I'm wading into new territory. But maybe you need to fix a bug in an app that you don't often touch. Wading into that code base is kind of like learning and creating a mental map for that code base. One of the really magical pieces of copilot here is that that AI is collecting context of the application that you're going into. And so it can help you build that mental map and learn the code base, even if it's a language that you're already familiar in.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For college and university, but they also get to learn by kind of using the tools that likely are going to be part of the core DNA of the developer tool chain two, three, four years from now as AI starts to permeate our entire stack. So that was a pretty cool recent one that I talked to.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of us learn to code best by not by arbitrary exercises, but by actually building something that's going to be useful, right? Solving problems. And so what he does is he matches small businesses and medium-sized businesses who need to build internal tools with essentially classes of students, like a group of maybe six or eight students, and then gives those students co-pilot and says here. Small business, medium-sized business, you know, group of students, go build this internal tool for this business. And co-pilot is essentially kind of whispering in the student's ear, metaphorically speaking, hey, you know, here's how you solve this problem. Here's how you do this. And students build not only the tool, the software that the business needs, and then get to put that on their resume and their application.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. There are so many of those. I mean, I'll just kind of give a couple of recent ones that I've heard. So I was talking to one developer who was, he's actually an educator. And he's teaching kids how to code, usually like kind of high school age, right? So 16, 15, that kind of thing. And his experience matches my own, which is”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“into the editor and gives the developer often multiple suggestions that they can choose from and just kind of pick and choose what is the what is the right solution to solve the problem for the thing they're trying to create”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things where I'm focusing on some product, some piece of software that I'm going to give to my customers, my users, the labor of remembering what's the order of a parameters that need to come into a particular API. Or, hey, what's the particular syntax of this thing I'm supposed to do? Or, oh, I've got to create a bunch of dummy data that is days of the week or month in the year. Like that's just labor. It's not creating. It's just typing. Copilot helps developers stay in the flow by bringing all of that information into the editor, preventing them from having to go check out documentation or watch tutorial or go to Stack Overflow. And either find an answer or worse have to ask a question and wait for an answer. It just brings all of that.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“VS Code, it could be IntelliJ, it could be Vim. Essentially, as you were typing, Copilot will provide suggestions, usually in kind of this like italicized gray text that is really, to your point, kind of magical what it's able to infer based upon the variables around it, the class names, the method names around it, your comments, co-pilot kind of infers what you intend to create, and then hopefully does a pretty good job at nailing it by providing scaffolding code template that you can then riff on. What we tend to find is that developers love it. They really enjoy, they kind of find themselves getting a little addicted to it because it helps them stay in the flow, right? Like as developers, we love to be in that place. I love to be in that place where I'm creating.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sure. So developers for the last 20 years or more have had essentially simple intellisense autocomplete. You hit the period and you get the next variable that might come up. It's helpful for moving a little bit faster through your code, helpful sometimes for remembering what the particular syntax might look like for a method or a function. Copilot is essentially that magnified by many lines of code. It is multi-lined autocomplete that is fundamentally powered by an AI model called Codex, which is a derivative of another kind of one that you might be familiar with, GPT-3. When you are in the editor, it could be”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years, we've really expanded that portfolio to include so many different parts of the developer lifecycle. Again, I talked there about code spaces and copilot, but it's also actions for CICD and advanced security. as developers, we are so much more than just where we put our code. There's a whole part of the toolchain there. And to get to an opportunity to work on so many V1 products, that is creation itself, right? To be able to build an entirely new product, get it out to market, test it, iterate on it, and really feed on the energy that's coming back from the community.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On everything from, I don't know, and AI technology like copilot to a cloud-hosted development environments like code spaces, repos, which literally every single developer on the planet is like participating in some way on GitHub repos in the typical year. And so that was what I wanted to accomplish. It's just like, how do I get more connected to the community, especially the community outside of what Microsoft could reach on its own? And the decision to move as well, I think, was really focused not just on what GitHub was and MAV is at the time, but what GitHub also can be. I mean, GitHub has more than a decade, nearly a decade and a half of history of bringing developers together to collaborate on code through repositories. But in the last few years,”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when the acquisition happened, like it was clear that so much of the energy, so much of the focus and the innovation that was going to be happening around developer tools and services was going to be happening around GitHub. I mean, that's where the community is creating. That's where people are learning. That's where so much of the mindshare of just the development community is focused. And like I said, I'm motivated. What I care about is helping people create. And it was very clear to me that there was no place that I could have a larger impact than working at GitHub. And so I really took that opportunity to make the transition out of a little bit more kind of enterprise focused internal role at Microsoft to going where I could work.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. You know, so like I said, I was working on development tools and developer services when I was there at Microsoft. Specifically, I was a leading product for what they call one.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, a very, you know, it's so happens that like yellow, I think I would do like a really vibrant gold sunshine yellow if I was if I was, you know, in that business.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“engineering. That's what I've been doing for the last little bit more than 20 years now, working sometimes in startups, some of them other people, some of them my own, about 10 years at Microsoft and now three years at GitHub.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As humans, since the dawn of time have been painting on cave walls and dancing around the fire and writing stories and novels and singing to each other. And I was just really interested in how we kind of convey our experience of the world to others. And so I kind of, I got started in software development and product management because I wanted to be in the business of creativity. And like we're at a really, really unique time in human history where we actually get to witness the advent of a brand new medium, like software development and the worlds that it creates wasn't possible, maybe 50, 60 years ago now. And, you know, if I'd been born in the 1700s, I probably would have been the guy making, I don't know, new colors of paint and paintbrushes, but it wasn't. I was born kind of at the turn of the 21st century. And so I work in it.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“wow you're gonna make me remember all the way back to school okay uh yeah so back in school i like i was not a classic software engineering uh cs major i studied the um kind of esoteric answer is philosophy of aesthetics in 20th century critical theory the easier access answer is philosophy in english but primarily it was really about like how do we as people communicate with each other how do we express ourselves through creativity we like you know as”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Codeball. Well, we took that same data snapshot and we brought it to our friends over at OpenAI to see like, okay, what can we do with these large language models built on public code? Well, it turns out we can do some pretty cool things.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had actually created a snapshot of GitHub's public code for what we call the Arctic Code vault. Essentially, this is up and like way in the Nortlands of Finland. There's a seed vault. And we were like, you know what? Like seed vaults are really there to preserve the diversity of the world's flora in seeds in case of some crazy either natural or man-made disaster. Another really important asset to the world is our code, our open source. Like this represents actually a lot of the collective, well, certainly software, if not like intelligence of kind of like the modern world, right? And so we had put this snapshot of public repositories on these silver film that would be preserved for thousands of years in this arctic.”
2022-09-04 · Lenny's Podcast · The role of AI in product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub, Copilot) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source