For the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitcheroff.

This is the Daily.

For the past few years, people all over the world have been asking how AI will change their lives or affect their work.

And the answers range from total salvation to absolute doom.

At the front lines of all of this are software developers who are using artificial intelligence

so much that it's already taking over many of their day-to-day tasks. Today, I talked to Times Magazine writer Clive Thompson

about his recent survey of the tech industry

to find out what it looks like

when people invite AI to do their jobs.

It's Tuesday, April 14th.

Clive Thompson, legendary tech reporter, a person whose work I have admired for a very long time.

Welcome to the Daily.

It's good to be here.

So you are here because you've been covering extensively the question of how much AI is affecting the workers who are really the backbone of Silicon Valley programmers, the people who write the code that powers every piece of software we use. This is a group of people you know well, not least of all

because you wrote a book about them. You spent a lot of time talking to them in recent months.

So what did you find? Walk us through that reporting, what it entailed, and what it unearthed.

Sure. Well, I'd been following the arrival or the advent of AI as a tool that can write code for a couple of years now.

But it started to accelerate a lot last year. And I really just wanted to find out, you know,

what was going on in the everyday trenches of software development. So I just hit the road and I

talked to about 75 different software developers all around the country. Yeah.

75. Yeah. That's a lot. That's a lot of them. Yeah. I might have overdone it. But I really wanted

to know what was going on kind of across the board because different software developers have very different types of jobs, right? So I wanted to talk to people who are doing consulting work for regional banks in Tennessee, people who are doing buzzy little startups, just the two of them in Silicon Valley trying to make something new.

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