AI-driven coding assistants have amassed nearly $1bn of funding since the start of last year, a signal that software engineering is becoming the first “killer app” for generative artificial intelligence. Companies such as Replit, Anysphere, Magic, Augment, Supermaven and Poolside AI raised $433mn so far this year alone, bringing the total since January 2023 to $906mn, according to Dealroom. The rush to pour money into AI coding assistants is an indication that computer programming is the first job function to be transformed by the latest wave of AI technology. “Today, software engineering and coding is the number-one area impacted by AI,” said Hadi Partovi, chief executive of education non-profit organisation Code.org and a long-time Silicon Valley investor and adviser to Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox and Facebook. “At this point, software engineering without AI is a little bit like writing without a word processor.” Growing conviction in Silicon Valley of the benefits of AI coding stands in contrast to questions among some investors about the economic benefits of generative AI and likely returns on Big Tech’s projected trillion-dollar investment into computing infrastructure to support the technology over the coming years.
Hannah Seal, a partner at Index Ventures, which has invested in start-up Augment, alongside Eric Schmidt and others, said it was “much easier to monetise AI if you can embed your product into an existing workflow, and make the benefit instantly visible”. For AI tools to make money, the questions for Seal are: “What is the time to value, and how meaningful is that value-add?”, while she added that “with coding co-pilots, the answer is very clear”. AI enthusiasm has prompted start-ups and tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google to vie for dominance in a crowded sector, building AI assistants and agents that can write and edit computer code. An executive on Code.org’s board, which includes David Treadwell, Amazon’s head of ecommerce, and Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, recently told Partovi their company would stop hiring people who code without AI by the end of the year, he said. “The easier [programming] becomes, the more demand goes up, because so much more technology can be built,” Partovi added. Microsoft-owned GitHub, the world’s biggest software development platform, was one of the first to turn a large language model — software that underpins ChatGPT, which can generate text, images or code — into a coding assistant.
Full story : AI-powered coding pulls in almost $1bn of funding to claim ‘killer app’ status.
