GitHub reveals Australian developer trends, impact of ChatGPT
New data on Australian developer trends has been released by GitHub in its updated GitHub Innovation Graph for the first quarter of 2024. Over the past four years, the Innovation Graph has provided significant insights, helping researchers track and measure trends within the software development landscape. A prominent study leverages this data to highlight how the widespread adoption of ChatGPT has impacted developer engagement across various programming languages. It notes that rather than introducing a substantial number of new developers to the field, ChatGPT is primarily improving the efficiency of existing developers.
Data Insights and Visualizations
The Innovation Graph enables data access by metrics or economies, visualising top programming languages, the total number of users by country, economy collaborators, and more. The latest data for Australia reveals that more than 1,574,000 Australian developers and over 86,000 Australian organisations are actively building on GitHub. Australian developers have uploaded code to GitHub more than 1.6 million times. Additionally, Australian developers or organisations own over 3.4 million repositories on GitHub.
The tool also tracks collaboration between global economies by counting the git pushes sent and pull requests opened between different economies. Australia's top collaborators were identified as the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. JavaScript remains the highest-ranked programming language among Australian developers based on the number of unique developers who uploaded code, followed by Python and Shell.
Research Findings and Insights
An interview featuring Alexander Quispe, a junior researcher at the World Bank, and Rodrigo Grijalba, a data scientist, sheds light on how they have utilised the Innovation Graph data in their work. Speaking about their research at the Munich Summer Institute, Quispe remarked, “Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionised various fields, with software development being one of the most impacted."
Their research analyzed the impact of ChatGPT on the velocity of software development. Quispe noted that ChatGPT significantly increased the number of Git pushes per 100,000 inhabitants of each country, although its correlation with the number of repositories and developers per 100,000 inhabitants was not statistically significant. Grijalba highlighted how GitHub’s Innovation Graph data integrated well with their methodologies, particularly with synthetic methods.
Further elaborating on their research methods, Quispe explained that they used synthetic difference-in-differences (SDID) as the parallel trends assumption required for the traditional difference in differences (DiD) method did not hold for their treatment and control groups. Commenting on the limitations of their study, Quispe acknowledged critiques regarding VPNs potentially allowing individuals in restricted countries to access ChatGPT. Going forward, Quispe expressed a desire to conduct similar analyses using administrative data at the software developer level.
Future Predictions
In terms of future predictions, Quispe suggested, "The future likely holds increased integration of AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot in software development processes." He recommended policymakers support the integration of AI tools to enhance productivity and economic growth and advised developers to leverage such tools to boost their efficiency.
