Latest / DevQuestions with Tim Corey / 155 AI is Everywhere, Now What? (Microsoft Build Conference Special)

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155 AI is Everywhere, Now What? (Microsoft Build Conference Special) · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to a special episode of Dev Questions here in Seattle at Microsoft Build Conference.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Microsoft asked me a few weeks ago to come out and cover the conference and give you a perspective on what they are announcing here at Build.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to do this because I wanted to give that perspective of, okay, we hear a lot of hype, but what does it really mean?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: How does it impact us?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: And is it important what they're releasing and how you think about the different things they're talking about?
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you want to summarize what Microsoft Build is covering this week, it's basically AI.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's the big thing.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: They have over 50 announcements they're making, but most of them revolve around artificial intelligence, how they put artificial intelligence in the various platforms Microsoft supports.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk briefly about what they announced today at the keynote session, then we'll go into kind of what it means for us as developers.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because, you know, spoiler alert here, this is not going to take away work from us.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: This is going to add more work to our plates.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: So in the keynote, it was all about artificial intelligence.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: So from the CEO on down, they were talking about how they have taken artificial intelligence and put it into the various Microsoft products.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: One of the ones I'm excited for is AI inside of Windows.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: So we're used to the pretty basic search capabilities inside of Windows, even sometimes frustrating search capabilities of Windows.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: But now we'll have built in, when I say AI, it's Chat GPT type AI, where built into Windows, you can hit a button and say, hey, I want to do this on my computer, and it will tell you how to do that thing, and it will also offer to do it for you.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: So the example they gave was I wanted to change my environment.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if so, just click the button, it turns a focus timer on.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or hey, I want to go into dark mode in Windows.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: How do I do that?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it says, well, here's the instructions, but do you just want to hit the button and just do it?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: And so very easily it can take a even novice Windows user, a person who maybe just started using Windows, or a person who is not a tech savvy person, and gives them the opportunity to become a power user, a user who can can do more with Windows and be more self-reliant.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that's, you know, from a tech perspective, one of the things that happens often for us is I'm a software developer.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: But to my family and friends and the people who are not in the tech sector, that means I can fix their computer.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: That's kind of the understanding that comes with that.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: And so one of the things I get asked a lot is, hey, how can I set up this printer?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_02: How can I configure this in Windows?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, I need to turn this setting on or off in Windows.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: How do I do that?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And this is what excites me about the built-in AI.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_02: Not just they can take away some of those, you know, uh holiday conversations that we have with our relatives and our loved ones, but also that it can empower them to be able to do these things on their own, to be self-directed and be able to choose what they want and how they want in a way that is safe for them, but it's also very, very powerful and gives them much more opportunity to make Windows theirs.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: But of course, the AI is that's just a small part of what they're doing with AI at Microsoft.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: They also add it into Microsoft Edge, or they're adding it to Microsoft Edge, so that when you're on a web page and you say, hey, I want to know more about this thing, maybe there's a lot of text in the website.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Can you summarize this?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: Or can you explain to me about that?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll read the web page and be able to pull information out of there and summarize it for you, or give you more information based upon the information on the site itself.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: So the integration into Edge and the things they can do there is pretty impressive.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_02: But the biggest one I think is probably the integration into all the Visual Studio products, Visual Studio Code, as well as Visual Studio Community Edition and up.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so the idea of Copilot and Copilot for everything is pretty impressive.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_02: The I've been using Copilot X, which is the chat feature inside of Copilots, an additional thing they've they've added on that they're now releasing into a larger preview window.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's a pretty impressive platform where you can say, hey, what does this code do?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: And have it explain it to you.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: This again, again, talking about that that Windows user who maybe is not the power user, but can act like one because of this AI assistant.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Well, in the same way as a developer, maybe you're coming into a code base and you don't really know what's going on.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: And usually you ask a senior developer and they help you out, and you kind of feel bad about asking too much and so on.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Well, with with this feature of Copilot X, there's a lot less need for that because the system can tell you, okay, based upon this code, this is what this does.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: It will help give you guidance on how to use that code, maybe even how to fix bugs in that code, or how to write unit tests for that code.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of that work can be done automatically.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: Now, again, I've as I've counseled with all AI usage, you don't always want to blindly follow AI down the path because you do need to have some understanding of what's going on and be able to decide is this the right choice or not?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: The right choice for me, the right choice of a situation, the right choice based upon what I'm doing.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so there does have to be a level of knowledge, but it does not have to be the higher level of knowledge that we're used to when working with code.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so this allows you to much more quickly get up to speed in a new organization with a new code base or with a new spot in your code base.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: It can also help you write those unit tests that maybe you've been kind of pushing off or not doing when you probably should have to make your code more resilient and more easy to change as you have more confidence in what changes do to impact the rest of the code base.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, some really cool stuff with Copilot.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: They're also they kind of branded you know, Copilot for a lot of different things.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's Copilot now for Office, which is pretty cool.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um the example they showed was a large document full of legalese.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they said, hey, summarize this.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: What is what are the important parts of this?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: And hey, let's use plugins like a legal plugin to say, hey, does it cover this?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: Or does it is it compliant for for this area or this region?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of cool things where it can take not only the base AI or chat GPT style AI, but it can also take plugins to bring additional information in from other knowledge sources to help kind of grow this platform in a way that's that's really impressive.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of AI stuff here, but the question is is this relevant for us?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Is this important?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: Is it something we should know about?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: But also is this going to take our job?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Is it going to reduce the amount of developer jobs in the world?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is it going to kind of push us out as more and more things become automated?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the answer is just the opposite.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: I really see as we've we've looked at what AI can do and what the capabilities are, that there's a lot more use cases for a lot more development.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, they kind of showed off where even a rookie developer or a person who's even never developed can create some plugins to Chat GPT, can create plugins to Bing and to Edge and all the other co-pilots and can kind of integrate their own things into it so that you can search through Spotify or use that Spotify library to figure things out as part of your overall experience.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a lot of things, these integrations here that really take a lot of businesses to the next level.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: And because of that, yes, you can, as a non-developer, kind of work through these things and figure these things out, but it's going to take some logic, some um understanding of how systems work to really take these things from a good demo to an actual product you can rely on.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where developers come in.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: The thing that AI does really well is it takes the pre-existing things we've done and helps us do more of those things, maybe tweaked or changed a little bit, but do more of those things.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: What does not do well at all is figure out your logic for you.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so the ability to take these various pieces and put them together in logical ways that build a really powerful platform is going to take developers.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: One of the examples they gave was a person who's a podcaster who wanted to take that podcast and use various AI pieces on it to generate an image, to grab a transcript, to pull out the speaker's information and to get a bio from the web and all these other things, create a tweet or LinkedIn posts and to bring all that together into one system.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's that's not one AI.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: That's not one thing you can just ask for.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: You have to go to various systems and connect these things in a logical manner.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Think of these like I now have methods that I can call that I need to connect into one integrated application.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: The idea that you're gonna call these different methods as you need them to create the application you need.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: We already do this.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: We were already provided with a lot of methods beforehand.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we talk about the.NET library in C sharp.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: We see a whole list of methods and things that are provided for us out of the box.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: We don't get concerned by that.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: We don't think, oh, you know, I'm not gonna be a developer anymore because all this stuff's already written.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: The point is not the methods, the point is the overall logic of the application that's on you as a developer.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we're seeing here with AI.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: The AI is definitely elevating what we can do and how fast we can do it and how much we can do, but it still takes the logic of connecting the dots together to create something that is functional, that's safe, that's secure, that is helpful to users, and it's really gonna make an impact in the world going forward.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, with that, there's a lot of stuff being announced at build.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: Don't worry about the AI, but instead embrace it, I think, because I think that what it's gonna do is actually take us to the next level, take us to the level where we can do things faster and better because we're never going to run out of work to do.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: There is so much work.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: And in fact, AI is actually creating more work for us because more people will want to build things off this platform, be able to leverage this to make their business even more relevant and more helpful and more useful and more automated.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: And so for us as developers, what I see is a very long road ahead of a lot of work to be done.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: And we get the opportunity to join into that, to use our skills and abilities in new and different ways to really launch forward into this new era of AI-assisted everything by being able to be the ones that build the logic, build the systems, and be able to put these things together in a way that really helps our business, helps society in general, and even helps ourselves with some of the tasks that we need to do.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of the overview of what's going on at build this week.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: There's more to come.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: I do have a couple of interviews coming up that you'll see over the next couple of weeks and months where I'm talking to Microsoft employees about what their thoughts are on the various announcements and releases that are going on, as well as you know how they got into development, how you know we can follow in their footsteps to really become better developers faster.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: So look forward to that.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: I look forward to seeing you in the future.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for watching.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: And as always, I am Tim Corey.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Dev Questions.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer.
• 13:19
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• 13:26
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• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did.
• 13:39
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