The view from the labs: What's next for AI-assisted development
April Leonard, Angela Jiang, Richard Seroter, and Rohan Varma examine which developer skills and workflows will matter as AI capabilities advance, drawing on their work across GitHub Copilot, Anthropic, Google Cloud, and OpenAI.
Discussion overview
Recorded live at GitHub Universe 2026, the panel looks ahead to the next two years of AI-assisted development. The discussion connects frontier models, autonomous agents, and MCP integrations with changes in software architecture, code security, and everyday development workflows.
A central theme is the relationship between AI capabilities and human judgment: how to think about tasks handled by AI, which developer skills will remain important, and where investment in AI development is receiving too much or too little attention.
Speakers
- April Leonard — VP of Engineering for GitHub Copilot, GitHub
- Angela Jiang — Head of Product, Claude Platform, Anthropic
- Richard Seroter — Senior Director and Chief Evangelist, Google Cloud
- Rohan Varma — Product Lead, Enterprise Agents, OpenAI
Session chapters
- 00:00 — Welcome to GitHub Universe 2026
- 01:10 — Surprising AI development trends
- 03:46 — AI vs. human judgment in tasks
- 10:13 — Optimism for software development
- 14:24 — Over- and under-invested AI areas
- 24:11 — Future developer skills
- 26:06 — Judgment remains key