AI Can Write Code. Why Isn’t Software Better?

Where the fuck is all the automation?

Yeah.

AI is so unbelievably smart, and yet it's so useless at all other stuff.

It doesn't matter how much AI coding agents you use, the software actually isn't getting better. [laughs]

[laughs]

Maybe you're writing it faster. It's like-

Yes

... arguably getting worse.

OpenAI has been trying to automate customer service since 2020. What I want instead is smart software. I want to expand what software itself can do, such that things that should be automatable can then be automatable.

My favorite thing that you guys say is, "We build prod, not God."

[laughs] That's so good.

Because if we had any other kind of, like, big lab leader, even if they had joy, they would cover that.

[laughs]

[laughs]

And then your view is so different. You're like, "No, we're gonna create a way better world."

For nuanced reasons, I don't think we are on the path of RSI. In the SaaSpocalypse story-

Mm

... um, AI can write software, but what if the bigger opportunity is putting intelligence inside the software itself? In this episode, Ben Horowitz and Martín Casado sit down with TypeSafe AI founder Diogo Almeida to talk about Jev and a different vision for how AI changes computing. Diogo argues that coding agents make it faster to produce the same kind of software we already have. Jev is aimed at expanding what software itself can do, giving developers a new primitive for turning natural language intent into decisions that programs can actually use. They get into why reliability matters more than impressive demos, what a new era of probabilistic programming could look like, and why AI might make existing software dramatically more useful rather than simply replacing it. And beneath all of this is the question that drove Diogo to build TypeSafe in the first place: If AI is already this smart, where is all the automation?

Today-

[laughs]

... we have the founder and leader of TypeSafe, Diogo, with us, who is a bit of a hero to both Martín and me.

Yes.

He is not only building, like, a really interesting product, but creating what we think is a very important movement. So we're super excited about today. Welcome, Diogo.

Thanks for coming. Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. Maybe you can give us a brief on what is Jev, what is TypeSafe, why is it important?

Is this, uh, curse-friendly or no?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Oh.

Oh, okay, cool.

He's working. You tell him. [laughs]

Oh, okay, okay, okay, cool.

[laughs]

So I was actually asked-

Maybe something, yeah

... uh, for like a elevator pitch, which I tend to ramble on, and I don't do well. But, like, I realized my favorite elevator pitch for Jev is-

Yeah

... where the fuck is all the automation?

[laughs]

Like, this is, like, so-

Oh

... unbelievably tragic.

Yes.

You know, so much intelligence.

Yeah.

AI is so unbelievably smart and yet so... Not that I hate on chatbots or coding agents, I love them myself, but it's, like, so useless at all other stuff, and it's tragic. It's tragic-

Yeah

... so that we have so much, like, diamond in the rough, but not polished for work. But TypeSafe is making AI for software. You know-

Yes

... we want to make AI powerful not just for humans in the loop, but to actually build real software, and Jev, to us, is our first model in