text stringlengths 0 2.02k |
|---|
**Eran Yahav:** I think for idiomatic things, there is a world in which you will not write your functions anymore; but it'd be very idiomatic. In a sense, this is already happening with libraries, right? You don't write the user library instead of writing the function, because what the library has encapsulated is so re... |
What is still being written and maybe can be avoided in the future is simple compositions of these functions that are also semi-repeatable. This is what Tabnine, in effect, is doing right now. It is generating for you these ad hoc compositions that we're doing, like read from Kafka, call to Twilio, whatever. We're all ... |
Again, remember that what we're all doing is specification discovery by iterative refinement, right? So maybe you can get the synthesizer, you can get Tabnine to generate the first chop of the function, but then you'll have to refine it on your own. And then there's really a question which is human psychology: what is ... |
One of the things that you see with Tabnine, for experienced users of Tabnine - they start to change how they work, to get even more from the tool. So they get a feel of what Tabnine does, and then, for example, they start writing the building-block functions before they compose them, and then Tabnine is aware of them ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I followed you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[56:03\] Can we talk about how the developer interacts with-- I would call it probing Tabnine for something? Maybe one of the ways you do that is by writing code, and it starts to think about what you're going to write. Or as you said, writing out a scaffolding. So it's aware of the whole entire cu... |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. That's super-interesting. And in fact, I always say that Tabnine is half an AI company and half a user interaction company, because half the challenge you hear is, really -- the model knows a lot. The model knows much more than you can imagine, actually. And the question is how do you expose these... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's psychological thing, for sure. When you make your own choices, you feel more sturdy in those choices, because you were a part of making the choice. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Even if I walk you deliberately through a very deterministic kind of path, the fact that you think that you've made certain choices - it's less offensive to you as a human than just consuming code generated by the machine, right? |
**Jerod Santo:** It's like holding your hand. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. It's very important. It is really important, and this part of the interaction model. And we tried a lot of the interaction models over the years, including ones that had larger snippets. We even had "Click something and we'll show you the five snippets that you want on the side" kind of thing on a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What you're saying there is cognitive load. If your model has so much information-- I'm actually listening to this book right now - and I say listening, because I listen to a lot of books instead of reading - and it's pretty interesting... It's called "We Are Legion", and in parentheses, "We Are Bob... |
\[01:00:13.29\] So the book really now is like the narrator is Bob, and Bob is AI, and Bob makes more Bobs. So Bob isn't by himself. And as Bob clones himself, he thinks -- because he's still human as AI, he has human tendencies, he thinks, "If I clone myself - well, now I'm just making more Bobs." And he finds out tha... |
**Eran Yahav:** Again, I say that Tabnine is half an AI company and half a UX company because a lot of the challenges are really in getting the humans to interact with the model in a way that accelerates them and does not slow them down. And so we've found out, through experimentation over the years, that you can sugge... |
And so we've optimized Tabnine to go in the process that you're familiar with... And if you just keep on typing and ignore what Tabnine does , just ignore it, it will never break your flow, right? So we always optimize it so it does not break your flow; that it's suggesting only at certain places that we think are usef... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Eran Yahav:** And so it is really like strapping a rocket to the human that has such massive force that it will just tear the human apart, and you have to throttle it to make sure that it's just-- \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love all this figurative language and imagery that comes about with this. |
**Eran Yahav:** No, but it does exactly that. You need to just accelerate it and control acceleration such that you make the human faster, but not destroy them in the process. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Let's not destroy the humans. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I like that you are so focused on the loyalty to developers, and that you had said that you're not trying to-- Jerod asked the question before about, okay, well Codex seems to be better because it's got more code samples and it's got more it's learned from. You're optimizing for the best algorithm t... |
**Jerod Santo:** You're not going to get him to agree to that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Eran Yahav:** I'm not going to agree to that. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** I know he is not going to agree to that. |
**Eran Yahav:** Obviously not, but I think it is important to keep the user in mind and optimize for the user. It often does mean that you need the better model and the better codebase to do that. But you have to realize that the bottleneck to a lot of these processes is the human. It's important to acknowledge that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:04:11.23\] That's what I was trying to get back to, is like, you're trying to help the human be the best they can be, because they have the intent, they have the human interaction with the team, they understand where the product's going... It's their vision. The model and the AI may be able to ... |
**Eran Yahav:** That's fair, I think. Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So it seems like it adds another layer of complexity to what you're trying to do here. Focusing on the UX now, and less on the model... Is that your product manifests itself in like 26 places, right? I don't know how many IDE integrations you have, but the actual user experience is spread out across al... |
**Eran Yahav:** That's a very interesting question. So definitely, there are subtleties to different IDEs, or actually, I should say editors, that behave differently, and they do get different behavior from Tabnine. So Tabnine does behave differently in VI and in VS Code, just by the nature, as you said, of the interac... |
**Jerod Santo:** So when you have an a-ha moment as a designer of this product, you and your team-- you went back to the point where it was like showing you five things on the side, and that became homework; you weren't empowering... When you decide, "You know what - we're going to change it to do this way now", do you... |
**Eran Yahav:** So again, a lot of the infrastructure is shared between the IDEs, like the Sublime plugin... I use mostly Sublime. Sublime is my love choice. So the Sublime plugin itself is like 400 lines of code. Most of the heavylifting is done by the Tabnine engine, and not by the plugin. |
**Jerod Santo:** I see. So the engine is shared, but it's local... |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. You do have to touch the plugins, but it's not like massive changes. For some of the more sophisticated UIs, some of them are provided by the engine itself and not in the editor, but again, these are subtleties. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[01:08:05.03\] Right. So what's the engine written in, and how do you guys roll that out? And I'm getting into the weeds here. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah. The engine is amazing. At this point, it's like half a million lines probably of Rust, highly optimized Rust code. I think we're probably one of the biggest Rust shops in Israel, for sure. And I'm not sure that we're actually not one of the most sophisticated ones in the world in Rust, because we'... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. \[laughter\] You must really like Rust. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah, we do. |
**Jerod Santo:** "Not the best tool for the job, but we're going to use it anyways..." |
**Eran Yahav:** Once you get used to it, it's a great language, a great ecosystem. It also solves a lot of the cross-platform problems that you typically have when you run something as sophisticated as an inference engine, cross-OS, cross-architecture. And so this is great for us. |
**Jerod Santo:** That is super cool. So does any of that stuff leak its way back out into the open source world at all, any of your by-products make their way out to the Rust community? |
**Eran Yahav:** I don't think that we released-- at least up to this point, we have not been releasing a lot of code to open source; not by choice, just by being busy with the core thing and not cleaning things up enough to be useful to others yet, at this point. So I think that has been the limiting factor, not any st... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the size of the company currently, like engineering staff, just to give a picture? |
**Eran Yahav:** So I think we're at least a number now. It's growing all the time. I think we're around 40 people now and most of it is still engineering. So that's the size. And yeah, a lot of Rust, some JavaScript, some Python on the ML pipelines... But yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, we have a lot of listeners who use and love Rust. So if you are hiring - I'm not sure if you are, but this would be a great time to say that, because you probably have some interested ears. |
**Eran Yahav:** Yeah, we're always hiring. We love Rust, and we've onboarded a few non-Rust people to the team... And Rust has a learning curve, which - I'm sure people can appreciate when they moved in from other languages. But again, once you get acquainted, it's amazing. So we love Rust. We are hiring. I don't know ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Awesome. Anything else that we didn't ask you, that's on your mind and you want to make sure we touch on before we call it a show? |
**Eran Yahav:** I don't know if we touched on it or not, but I think it's really important for people to understand that the AI-assisted development is here to stay. I think, for me, as someone who's been around this kind of area and a believer of AI-assisted developing for many years now, it's super exciting to see th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:17.13\] Given that -- so you have that opinion, given all your work in the field... What could developers do differently today and in the coming year or two, differently, knowing that AI-assisted development is, in your words, here to stay? What are some actions individual developers or team... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.