Github and the future of software

We recently started using GitHub to manage our code. With this amazing cloud-based tool multiple developers are able to work on the same software development project.

Where there is a conflict between the updates GitHub manages these divergent branches and allows one to merge the work back into the one production codebase.

It's owned by Microsoft and offered to the developers of the world for free.

The pedigree of Microsoft allows the world's programmers to trust that their sensitive, proprietary ideas are secure.

The question is what are the possible extrapolations of this growth.

When I look into the crystal ball I see the following.

The best minds of the world have trusted their most valuable ideas and creations to Github.

If GitHub in the future offers programmers a code optimisation tool, we will all sign up and accept the increased productivity.

Github will use machine learning and learn from the best code across all disciplines and all programming languages to be able to offer bug identification and code optimization to everyone.

This advanced spellchecker will advise when code is inefficient or if there were better ways of doing things. All learnt from the existing collection of the world's best code.

This will be a revolution in that one need only create the rough framework of your project and the Ai will flesh out the details in the most efficient way.

Take that forward and the Ai will build up its libraries of procedures that are super-efficient and unreadable to humans. Now the fly by wire concept would mean humans will do the bare minimum coding and the  Ai will write the actual code to such a high level of accuracy that it will be too complex for any human to understand.

Everyone will be able to write an app or computer program because nobody actually will write code. Working the way we currently do, would be the equivalent of using the hand tools of a caveman to create a modern car. Possible but a useless waste of effort. 

This implies that in the future our entire society will be built on increasingly complex systems that are beyond comprehension.

The inefficiency of readable code eliminated will see amazing advances in software, and this will spawn a new era of better Ai in an infinite loop of exponential growth. 

This presents obvious opportunities for bad actors and countries engaging in digital warfare. If left unchecked, sabotage and cyber-terrorism will be the next pandemic.

Up to now, Ai has been trained on images, video, and voice. These are prolific on the internet and the Ai have mastered these. Given this new source represents the best minds in computer science I believe that the emerging machine learning opportunities presented by GitHub will be a super game-changer in an era that has become acclimatised to game change. 

I could go deeper into the mists of the future, but I think that each iteration will have too many choices to be able to see the end game from our perspective.  The point being the opening of Github to developers for free and the way we have all flocked to the platform will have a huge evolutionary influence over the path humanity takes in the future. 

M Parak 

Apr 2021.

This article was written before Github published the "auto pilot" feature. Now I feel like an oracle.