“Everybody in the world is now a programmer.” — Jensen Huang
❓ What You’ll Learn
- How to reach your target audience with lower market risk?
- Where to get data to train your AI model?
- How to grow as your customers grow?
- How to monetize open-source projects?
- How to help users experience value faster?
- How to build trust and get early fans?
- How to write and edit code in natural language?
- How to protect know-how?
- How to grow on Google by targeting high-intent keywords?
- Who grew an AI coding assistant to $5,000,000 ARR?
- What side projects to build to generate leads?
- What do software engineers think about AI software engineers?
- How to future-proof your career as a software engineer.
🔍 Problem
Software engineers are hard to find, recruit and compensate.
Once you hire them, you risk knowledge being lost when they leave.
💡 Solution
AI software engineers can increasingly solve specific issues on their own.
While engineers focus on domain rules and high-level problems.
🗺️ Roadmap
1️⃣ Pick Your Niche
AI Coding Assistants
- CodePal • Dozens of AI code generation tools
- CodeWP • AI chat and coding tools for WordPress creators
- GitHub Copilot • The world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool
- Bito • Accessible, accurate AI tools trusted by developers across the world
- Amazon CodeWhisperer • Your AI-powered productivity tool for the IDE and command line
- Tabnine • Private and personalized AI coding assistant
- Codeium • The most intelligent AI code generation tool
- Sourcegraph Cody • Search, write and understand code fast
- CodeGPT • AI code chat, auto-completion, explanation, error-checking and more
- AutoCode Pro • Build Chrome extensions, web and mobile apps from text
- AlphaCode • Competitive programming tool with critical thinking, logic, algorithms and more
2️⃣ Build Your App
- Build a plugin for popular code editors such as VS Code and JetBrains IDEs. You can reach your target audience with lower market risks.
- Build an AI agent that completes coding tasks on autopilot.
- Devin can do Upwork gigs on autopilot.
- CodeGPT can handle coding tasks on your behalf.
- ReactAgent builds React components from user stories.
- Fine has AI agents that understand, analyze, generate and test code.
- Train your own model to differentiate from competitors.
- Tabnine is trained on open-source repositories.
- Refact combines its custom and third-party AI models.
- GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages from public repositories.
- CodeWP offers AI chat and coding tools trained for WordPress creators.
3️⃣ Pick Your Monetization Strategy
- Charge per user to grow as your customers grow.
- Offer subscriptions to get predictable revenue.
- Build a monetized open-source tool. Let customers self-host or pay for a managed solution.
4️⃣ Find Your First Customers
- Build a playground to help users experience value faster.
- Tabby has a playground with a sample coding task.
- Blackbox AI has a playground with pre-built coding prompts.
- Codeium has a playground with Python, JavaScript, Go, C++ and Java.
- Share sample problems that your tool can solve. This helps customers understand your value better.
- Build in public to get trust and early fans. Share challenges, milestones and product updates.
- Shawn Wang is building smol.ai in public.
- William Zeng and Kevin Lu are building Sweep in public.
- Sandeep Pani and Naresh Ramesh are building Aide in public.
5️⃣ Improve User Experience
- Let users chat with the code. Make it easy to write and edit code with natural language.
- Tabnine has an AI chat that can generate and document code.
- Cursor lets you edit an entire method or class with a single prompt.
- Replit Ghostwriter lets you generate and summarize your code via a chat.
- GitHub Copilot lets you chat with your code to build new features and fix bugs.
- Offer personalized services to show commitment to your customer’s success.
- Have a strong privacy policy to address concerns about code and know-how privacy.
- Tabnine has a dedicated privacy page.
- GitHub Copilot has a trust center with privacy and security policies.
- Codacy shares security policies on infrastructure, data encryption and more.
6️⃣ Boost Brand Awareness
- Use programmatic SEO to target high-intent keywords.
- AskCodi targets dozens of programming languages.
- ZZZ Code AI targets dozens of code generator and explainer tool keywords.
- CodePal has dozens of pages for the query “Code Generator for [Programming Language]”.
- Become a guest on interviews to boost your visibility.
- Amar Goel shared Bito on the AI Chat podcast.
- Eran Yahav talked about building Tabnine with Kyle Simpson.
- Kevin Hou talked about building Codeium at the Syntax podcast.
- Allan Mørch shares how he beat cancer and grew AskCodi to $5,000,000 ARR.
- Launch on ProductHunt to get more traffic.
7️⃣ Scale Your Business
- Use freemium to lower customer acquisition costs.
- Make your tool free for individual developers. Happy users will spread the word about you at work. This can lead to the adoption of your tool at the company level.
- Fine is free for individuals and small companies.
- Amazon CodeWhisperer is free for individual use.
- Codeium offers unlimited AI usage for individual developers.
- Use side project marketing to generate leads. Target search intents for solving development tasks.
🔗 Links
- The world’s first AI software engineer • The thread behind this report.
- Building a Report on AI Software Engineers • The tweet behind this report.
- Can AI Replace Software Engineers? • Software engineers discuss Devin and how to future-proof your career.
- How AI Code Generation Works • The benefits of AI code generation for developers.
🙏 Thanks
Thanks to Chris Beaumont and Stewart Townsend. We had a great time jamming on this report.
✏️ Emin researched and wrote this report. Dru researched and edited this report.
📈 What else?
Trends PRO #0147 — AI Software Engineers has more insights.
What you’ll get:
- 25 AI Software Engineer Niche Examples (128% More)
- 9 Ways to Build AI Software Engineers (200% More)
- 9 Ways to Monetize AI Software Engineers (200% More)
- 7 Ways to Find Your First Customers (133% More)
- 11 Ways to Improve User Experience (267% More)
- 7 Ways to Boost Brand Awareness (133% More)
- 9 Ways to Scale AI Software Engineers (200% More)
- 10 Links (150% More)
With Trends Pro you’ll learn:
- (📈 Pro) How to serve niche development use cases?
- (📈 Pro) How to build an AI-powered Micro-SaaS?
- (📈 Pro) How all-in-one coding assistants are better than code generation tools?
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- (📈 Pro) Why should you build strategic partnerships?
- (📈 Pro) How to get contact details of prospective customers?
- (📈 Pro) How to get others to market your AI coding tool?
- (📈 Pro) How to build trust with ROI case studies?
- (📈 Pro) How to attract more users while offering more value in return?
- (📈 Pro) What are the economics of AI software engineers?
- (📈 Pro) Will programmers switch careers as AI evolves?
- And much more…
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