The “outer loop” is dead: How AI and cloud development will revolutionise developer experience

Abstract

Git heavily influenced our developer tooling, and much of our developer tooling revolves around the “post commit”. But, what if the commit was the last step, which came after our continuous integration? And, not before? We couldn’t do this before because we simply didn’t have machines powerful enough to run our builds. With cloud development environments, that’s no longer the case. And with AI does this mean that we’re on the cusp of a revolution of the pull request flow that has been so prevalent. Is the combination of AI “pair programming” and cloud based development the push that will take the industry away form the typical pull request UI and force us to completely re-think our developer experience? And what if our outer loop will be completely removed and consumed by workspaces in the cloud?