I’ve spent the past 2 years building AI assistants for large engineering teams and witnessed the developer-AI relationship evolve, here’s my POV on the journey we’re experiencing and where we’re heading next:
Dev 1.0 - Hand-Crafted Code: The Baseline
These were the old days, when development was purely human-centric. Every function, every fix, and every line of boilerplate was meticulously written, tested, and reasoned through by the engineer. Velocity was dictated by typing speed, memory recall, and context switching ability.
Dev 1.2 - The Code Completion Boost
This marked the first major shift. The human developer was writing the code, and the AI was simply an autocomplete tool—a helpful passenger tossing out the next 3-10 lines of code when needed. It was a productivity hack, primarily focused on reducing cognitive load for repetitive tasks.
Dev 1.5 - The Deep Context Co-Pilot
This is where the interest truly jumped. The human developer became the Driver, and the AI became the Navigator. The human keeps control, setting the overall course, while the AI suggests snippets, completes logic blocks, and, crucially, provides extra context based on surrounding files or documentation.
Dev 1.8 - AI Drives the Micro-Iterations
The most exciting development is the role switch. The AI is now the Driver, leading the pair programming session. The human acts as the Navigator and reviewer. The AI proposes significant changes—implementing a feature one step at a time, refactoring a file, or migrating a component—and the human validates, corrects, gives high-level context, and steers the output. The crucial point here: the human is still in the loop. The "pair" is working in accelerated micro-iterations, achieving a level of speed and clarity previously unreachable.
So, what’s next in line? Here’s how I see it:
For teams managing large, complex, and evolving codebases, the next logical step is moving beyond the file or function and tackling full-context engineering workflows.
We’re currently working on what we think will define Dev 2.0, a true end-to-end engineering assistant, and I am super excited about it.
Hopefully, we’ll share some more about it over the next few weeks. 🙏
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