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Robotic Automations

Copilot Workspace is GitHub's take on AI-powered software engineering | TechCrunch

April 29, 2024 9:42 PM0


Is the future of software development an AI-powered IDE? GitHub’s floating the idea.

At its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco on Monday, GitHub announced Copilot Workspace, a dev environment that taps what GitHub describes as “Copilot-powered agents” to help developers brainstorm, plan, build, test and run code in natural language.

Jonathan Carter, head of GitHub Next, GitHub’s software R&D team, pitches Workspace as somewhat of an evolution of GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant Copilot into a more general tool, building on recently introduced capabilities like Copilot Chat, which lets developers ask questions about code in natural language.

“Through research, we found that, for many tasks, the biggest point of friction for developers was in getting started, and in particular knowing how to approach a [coding] problem, knowing which files to edit and knowing how to consider multiple solutions and their trade-offs,” Carter said. “So we wanted to build an AI assistant that could meet developers at the inception of an idea or task, reduce the activation energy needed to begin and then collaborate with them on making the necessary edits across the entire corebase.”

At last count, Copilot had over 1.8 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers. But Carter envisions a far larger base, drawn in by feature expansions with broad appeal, like Workspace.

“Since developers spend a lot of their time working on [coding issues], we believe we can help empower developers every day through a ‘thought partnership’ with AI,” Carter said. “You can think of Copilot Workspace as a companion experience and dev environment that complements existing tools and workflows and enables simplifying a class of developer tasks … We believe there’s a lot of value that can be delivered in an AI-native developer environment that isn’t constrained by existing workflows.”

There’s certainly internal pressure to make Copilot profitable.

Copilot loses an average of $20 a month per user, according to a Wall Street Journal report, with some customers costing GitHub as much as $80 a month. And the number of rival services continues to grow. There’s Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, which the company made free to individual developers late last year. There are also startups, like Magic, Tabnine, Codegen and Laredo.

Given a GitHub repo or a specific bug within a repo, Workspace — underpinned by OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model — can build a plan to (attempt to) squash the bug or implement a new feature, drawing on an understanding of the repo’s comments, issue replies and larger codebase. Developers get suggested code for the bug fix or new feature, along with a list of the things they need to validate and test that code, plus controls to edit, save, refactor or undo it.

Image Credits: GitHub

The suggested code can be run directly in Workspace and shared among team members via an external link. Those team members, once in Workspace, can refine and tinker with the code as they see fit.

Perhaps the most obvious way to launch Workspace is from the new “Open in Workspace” button to the left of issues and pull requests in GitHub repos. Clicking on it opens a field to describe the software engineering task to be completed in natural language, like, “Add documentation for the changes in this pull request,” which, once submitted, gets added to a list of “sessions” within the new dedicated Workspace view.

Image Credits: GitHub

Workspace executes requests systematically step by step, creating a specification, generating a plan and then implementing that plan. Developers can dive into any of these steps to get a granular view of the suggested code and changes and delete, re-run or re-order the steps as necessary.

“If you ask any developer where they tend to get stuck with a new project, you’ll often hear them say it’s knowing where to start,” Carter said. “Copilot Workspace lifts that burden and gives developers a plan to start iterating from.”

Image Credits: GitHub

Workspace enters technical preview on Monday, optimized for a range of devices including mobile.

Importantly, because it’s in preview, Workspace isn’t covered by GitHub’s IP indemnification policy, which promises to assist with the legal fees of customers facing third-party claims alleging that the AI-generated code they’re using infringes on IP. (Generative AI models notoriously regurgitate their training data sets, and GPT-4 Turbo was trained partly on copyrighted code.)

GitHub says that it hasn’t determined how it’s going to productize Workspace, but that it’ll use the preview to “learn more about the value it delivers and how developers use it.”

I think the more important question is: Will Workspace fix the existential issues surrounding Copilot and other AI-powered coding tools?

An analysis of over 150 million lines of code committed to project repos over the past several years by GitClear, the developer of the code analysis tool of the same name, found that Copilot was resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases and more code being re-added as opposed to reused and streamlined, creating headaches for code maintainers.

Elsewhere, security researchers have warned that Copilot and similar tools can amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept suggestions from AI-powered coding assistants tend to produce less secure code. (GitHub stressed to me that it uses an AI-based vulnerability prevention system to try to block insecure code in addition to an optional code duplication filter to detect regurgitations of public code.)

Yet devs aren’t shying away from AI.

In a StackOverflow poll from June 2023, 44% of developers said that they use AI tools in their development process now, and 26% plan to soon. Gartner predicts that 75% of enterprise software engineers will employ AI code assistants by 2028.

By emphasizing human review, perhaps Workspace can indeed help clean up some of the mess introduced by AI-generated code. We’ll find out soon enough as Workspace makes its way into developers’ hands.

“Our primary goal with Copilot Workspace is to leverage AI to reduce complexity so developers can express their creativity and explore more freely,” Carter said. “We truly believe the combination of human plus AI is always going to be superior to one or the other alone, and that’s what we’re betting on with Copilot Workspace.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Dripos raises $11M Series A to replace Square, Toast and 8 other pieces of software

April 24, 2024 10:01 PM0


Small coffee shops that relied on foot traffic were thrown for a loop when the global pandemic kept people in their homes. That’s when many coffee shop owners turned to technology to help them take online orders and payments.

Startups were also eager to help these businesses stay safely in business — and venture capital followed. For example, Joe Coffee raised some funding to help coffee shops take mobile orders, and Odeko and Cloosiv merged to combine their inventory and mobile-ordering apps. As a combined entity, Odeko subsequently raised tens of millions of dollars in venture-backed funding.

When Jack Pawlik and Avery Durrant founded New York-based coffee shop software company Dripos in 2019, they didn’t know they would soon be joining this group. The pair’s initial idea was to help local coffee shops build mobile ordering apps, similar to what Starbucks offers.

“The more we interacted with operators and shop owners, the more we realized that there was just a much bigger problem going on,” Pawlik told TechCrunch exclusively. “We were almost adding to that problem by being that kind of platform.”

Dripos co-founders and co-CEOs Avery Durrant and Jack Pawlik. Image Credits: Dripos

Through the conversations with shop owners, Pawlik and Durrant learned that many were using a simple point-of-sale system, like Square. It wasn’t bad, necessarily, but not “meant exactly for their workflow,” Pawlik said. Many shops then employed five to 10 other pieces of software to fill in the gaps.

Pawlik and Durrant decided to pivot and build a tool that would replace Square, Toast and those eight other pieces of software with one comprehensive tool.

Dripos brings together point-of-sale; mobile payments; employee management and payroll; loyalty and marketing automation; and administrative functions like accounting and banking.

Manny Caral, owner and operator of Revolucion Coffee + Juice with five locations in Texas, recently switched his locations to Dripos and said in a statement that Revolucion was one of those companies using five different things, including Toast and Square.

“We are able to achieve this and even much more through Dripos,” Caral said. “The product has allowed us to streamline our day-to-day operations and give us time back to focus more on our customer experience.”

Blank Street cracked the code on making coffee shops attractive to VC

Dripos’ approach has caught on with other customers as well. Last year was the company’s first full year with the new tool; it now has a presence in coffee shops across 46 states. The number of locations relying on Dripos increased 400%, and the company processes hundreds of millions in annual payments.

Now the company wants to invest in areas like technology development and go-to-market, so Pawlik and Durrant secured $11 million in Series A funding. Early-stage venture capital firm Base10 Partners, known for investments in Plaid, Instacart and Figma, led the round and was joined by a group of angel investors, including Y Combinator managing partner Michael Siebel, Punchh founder Shyam Rao and Bench founder Ian Crosby. In total, the company has raised $17.3 million.

As part of the investment, Base10 principal Caroline Broder, who led the Series A, joins the Dripos board.

“We have full conviction in this business model,” Broder told TechCrunch. “In the very beginning of our relationship, it was very clear that Jack and Avery had this vision of building a full suite. They built a ton of products to be able to come in and replace things like software early in the company’s lifecycle. They understand what these business owners want and need and what they’re not getting. Then they built something that’s very specifically made for them. That customer empathy is a rare quality.”

B Capital leads Odeko’s $53M Series D to help small coffee shops scale


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Seso is building software to fix farm workforces and solve agriculture's HR woes | TechCrunch

April 13, 2024 12:06 AM0


Migrant workers are a critical labor force for U.S. farms, but getting them here on proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and the compliance surrounding these employees is taxing for farms. Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline that process and now looks to expand into a one-stop-shop HR platform for the agriculture industry.

Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for his advice on whether her organic farm should expand. Despite demand for her harvests, Guirguis, whose entire career has involved job creation and the labor market, told her expanding wouldn’t be smart because the industry’s labor shortage would make hiring enough workers hard. That inspired Guirguis to found Seso to automate the H-2A visa process to help fix that issue and help farms stay compliant. Once he started talking to potential farm customers, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their HR beyond just finding workers.

“When it comes to the back office, every farm we visited had thousands of filing cabinets,” Guirguis said. “It’s one of the most laggard industries in the U.S. That was the eye-opening moment. We can address the labor shortage and build an end-to-end modern operating system starting with HR and modernize a lot of these really complex tasks.”

The startup just raised $26 million to expand its platform’s capabilities. The Series B round was led by Bond’s Mary Meeker with participation from Index Ventures, NFX, SV Angel, several Seso customers, and others. The company doubled its customer base in 2023 and works with 27 of the largest 100 agriculture employers in the U.S.

While agriculture is a massive industry ripe for disruption, it’s been relatively reticent to adopt new technology, he said. Guirguis thinks Seso has been successful in selling to farms so far, when many other startups haven’t been, because Seso isn’t trying to change the actual farming process, something farmers made clear to him that they weren’t ready for yet. Adopting back office tech is an easier sell.

“Your HR team is in the back office doing traditional HR work,” Guirguis said. “That is who we are trying to change behavior for, which is easier than for someone 50 years in the field still using pen and paper. They can still keep doing their process we have built products to adapt. You can take a picture of a [handwritten] time sheet and then use AI to make sure that is accurate.”

Guirguis’s focus on getting feedback from farmers directly is what pushed Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, to invest. Achadjian initially passed on Seso when it first tried to raise from Index, but how the company sells and interacts with farmers changed her mind.

“I remember this one customer call, I got chills,” Achadjian told TechCrunch. “[He said], ‘I get pitched by these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs all the time and they show up at your farm and they are like, ‘Here is how you should run their business.’ I always ask each of them to come and spend a day and work alongside me so they can understand what is a day in the life of the end customer and they never show up. Michael was the only one who showed up at 4 a.m. in the freezing cold, in the dark, to pick artichokes.’”

That feedback from farmers is why the company is expanding into automating payroll next. Guirguis said due to various agriculture employment laws, farm payroll is incredibly complicated. Workers are paid for how much crop they pick, Guirguis said, and the rate for each crop picked is different for a migrant worker versus a domestic worker and different again if migrant workers and domestic workers are picking from the same field. Guirguis sees numerous ways to expand after that.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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