Chelsea Troy Live with Tim O’Reilly
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
AI and developer productivity, how AI changes the job, and more
Do large language models make developers 26% more productive, as a paper recently claimed? Chelsea Troy, leader of Mozilla’s MLOps team and a lecturer in computer science at the University of Chicago, isn’t so sure.
Informed by her long career in software, Chelsea has sharp opinions about how generative AI tools relate to the actual work developers do and how that job is changing. Join in to learn where (and for whom) GenAI is most effective, some patterns that you may find particularly relevant, and the skills AI-enabled engineers actually need to have to excel.
After an introductory conversation with Tim, Chelsea will respond to questions from attendees, giving you a chance to better understand how the changes AI is bringing to software development might apply to your own situation and experiences.
Recommended prep or follow-up:
- Take Fundamentals of Machine Learning for Software Engineers (live course with Chelsea Troy)
- Follow and explore Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It (expert playlist)
- Read AI Engineering (book)
- Read Generative AI for Software Development (early release book)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Wednesday, June 18, 2025, at 8:00am PT / 11:00am ET
- Interactive discussion and Q&A (60 minutes)
Your Hosts and Guests
Tim O'Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc. His original business plan was simply "interesting work for interesting people," and that's worked out pretty well. He publishes books, runs online conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators. He’s perhaps best known for his role in shaping big ideas like open source software, unconferences (Foo Camp), Web 2.0, and government as a platform. His 2017 book WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us explored the role of human agency in shaping the future in the face of the coming AI wave. These days, he’s focused on mechanism design for the human-AI economy. Mechanism design is sometimes described as “reverse game theory”, whereby you start with the outcome you want and then figure out what rules of the game will produce that outcome. He explores these ideas at the non-profit AI Disclosures Project, which he co-founded with Ilan Strauss. He writes frequently on Substack at the O’Reilly Radar, the AI Disclosures Project’s Asimov’s Addendum, and his own Conversations with AI.
Chelsea Troy
Chelsea Troy leads the machine learning operations team at Mozilla. She also teaches in the Master’s Program in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her online workshop, Fundamentals of Technical Debt, is available On Demand through the O’Reilly platform, and she also gives live courses about machine learning, large language models, and product thinking.