The AI emperor has no DAUs why most devs still don't use code AI: Quinn Slack
Nov 20, 2024 · 18:45
Quinn Slack, CEO and cofounder of Sourcegraph, argues that despite massive hype, only about 5% of professional developers actually use Code AI tools, with total recurring revenue from Code AI sitting at roughly $300 million ARR—a fraction of Salesforce's $36 billion. He cites GitHub's 1.3 million paid Copilot subscribers and just 935,000 yearly active users receiving suggestions, revealing the gap between perception and reality. Slack warns that the entire AI ecosystem—foundation models, infra, and applications—risks collapse if usage doesn't grow, and most revenue in AI flows to NVIDIA and chip makers, not software. From building Cody, the number two Code AI product, he shares lessons: hype fools everyone, autocomplete is a freakishly good feature that spoils expectations, while chat and agents are harder to vet and adopt. He advises builders to use their own product daily, ignore customer demands for buzzwords like fine-tuning, and manually build explicit interactions before adding magic. Slack concludes that the industry must collectively dehype and focus on real daily active users to turn the potential into sustained enterprise revenue.
