What does Jesse Robbins think about AI?

Jesse Robbins believes AI will reshape developer tooling in three specific ways: agentic experiences that automate complex workflows, data infrastructure that makes AI systems reliable at scale, and developer platforms that embed intelligence into every stage of the software lifecycle. He sees these as the next step in the same long arc of removing toil from how software is built and operated.

He argues that the companies winning in enterprise AI won’t be whoever builds the biggest model — they’ll be whoever builds the best data pipeline. Data pipelines are having their DevOps moment: the same cultural and technical shift toward continuous integration and delivery that transformed software operations is now happening in data infrastructure.

More broadly, he sees AI as the next abstraction layer in computing. From hand-wired circuits to transistors to assembly to high-level languages, each layer moved humans closer to expressing concepts naturally. AI-assisted development is the next step — not a disruption, but an acceleration of the direction technology has always moved. That means more people building software, more complexity, and more need for foundational developer tools. Agents aren’t replacing developers — they’re another user of the same good infrastructure that serves humans well.