AI developer tools are a $50B+ market by 2028.

And the companies building them are some of the best places to work in AI.

The landscape: GitHub Copilot (code generation). Cursor (AI-native IDE). Replit (AI-powered development environment). Codeium (free AI code completion). Sourcegraph Cody (codebase-aware AI). Various AI testing tools, documentation generators, and code review assistants.

Why this market is exploding: there are 30+ million developers worldwide. Each one is a potential customer. And the productivity gains are measurable and immediate — developers report 30-60% faster coding with AI tools.

Roles: Developer Experience ML Engineer. Code Generation Model Specialist. IDE AI Integration Engineer. AI Code Review System Builder. Developer Workflow AI Designer.

The technical challenge: code generation requires understanding not just syntax but architecture, project conventions, security patterns, and the developer's intent from minimal context. It's one of the hardest generative AI problems.

Salaries at AI dev tools companies: $160K-$320K. These companies are well-funded (Cursor raised $100M+, GitHub is Microsoft-backed) and growing fast.

The meta observation: AI engineers building tools for other engineers is a wonderfully recursive career path. You use AI to build AI tools that help people build with AI.

If you're the kind of person who obsesses over developer experience and loves making other engineers more productive — AI dev tools is your playground.