Google’s ‘Always-On’ Coding Agent Is Coming. Where Is OpenAI’s?

AI coding assistants today have saved software engineers lots of time. The CEOs of Amazon, Google and many others can’t stop talking about it during their earnings calls.

But even the most popular AI coding tools today often work side-by-side with human engineers and require a lot of prompting and hand-holding.

That’s about to change.

Google, for instance, has been demonstrating new AI for software development ahead of its annual I/O developer conference, my colleague Erin scooped yesterday. Known as a “software development lifecycle agent,” it’s essentially an “always-on” coworker that can help automatically identify bugs to fix or flag security vulnerabilities, in addition to helping engineers with more complicated tasks like writing code for a new feature.