Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript from the Norwest Nowcast above where Norwest General Partner Dave Zilberman talks about the evolution of software development with the advent of AI and large learning models.
Dave Zilberman here with a Norwest Nowcast. I’ve spoken in the past about the transformative era of software development that is upon us and would like to elaborate.
There’s a confluence of events occurring:
- Every organization needs robust applications if they are to thrive and differentiate. This applies to internal and external applications.
- There’s a huge shortage of software engineers.
- And there are rapid advancements in tools for developing software.
There’s no silver bullet for the talent shortage. Training and retraining people takes time and perhaps generations. But just as the typewriter gave way to word processing and eventually GPT-3 to make everyone a good writer, no-code development tools will make non-engineers and their companies more productive.
The democratization of software development means millions of non-technical people will soon be creating software. And if that sounds far-fetched, think how ancient it seems to hand-code HTML versus using WYSIWYG solutions such as SquareSpace and Wix to create websites.
The democratization of software development means millions of non-technical people will soon be creating software.
More to the point, GitHub’s Copilot is a strong initial step towards automating basic code through an AI assistant. These solutions will liberate software developers to focus on product concept, design, and more complex project requirements.
For start-ups, we foresee huge opportunity in building infrastructure and developer applications that leverage large language models. We’d love to hear what you think these solutions might be. Use the comment section below to share your thoughts.