GitHub Doubles Down on Openness for Its Next Chapter
With CEO Thomas Dohmke’s departure in August and GitHub’s deeper integration into Microsoft, developers are asking what comes next for the platform. Ahead of this week’s Universe conference, I sat down with GitHub COO Kyle Daigle at GitHub’s San Francisco headquarters to address the future of developer choice, Copilot’s evolution and why GitHub isn’t worried about competition from AI coding agents.
GitHub’s Mission Hasn’t Changed
“I know folks ask questions around, well, what’s changing? Or are we going to change and just focus on selling GitHub and so forth? And we have a very healthy business with how we get GitHub into the hands of enterprises. And we have a huge amount of open source projects, obviously, and maintainers, that we continue to support,” Daigle said. “I think the thing that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, is GitHub’s mission. GitHub is still GitHub. We’re focused on developers. That hasn’t changed. If anything, what I’m feeling is we continue to get more resources, figurative and literal, to ultimately complete that mission with something like GitHub Copilot.”
He noted that GitHub relies on many teams and partners at Microsoft, including the VS Code team, for example. “If anything, the thing I’m feeling is this acceleration that’s been coming, because we’re able to work so closely together — and there’s such conviction that GitHub is different. GitHub is unique. We have a business that is so intertwined between every type of developer, and you can’t peel that apart. You know, it’s all together, and we don’t want to peel it apart. That’s what makes us special,” Daigle said.
As for some of the nervousness in the community — and especially the open source community — about Microsoft becoming more involved with GitHub, Daigle noted that this was also true when Microsoft originally acquired GitHub in 2018.
Image credit: The New Stack.
Chris Wanstrath, GitHub’s CEO at the time, had been seeking a replacement for himself. Once the acquisition closed, Nat Friedman became the CEO. Microsoft had acquired his startup, Xamarin, in 2016. Xamarin had deep open source roots, and that definitely helped to dispel some nervousness about Microsoft’s acquisition. Throughout the following years, even after Friedman left in late 2021 and HockeyApp founder Thomas Dohmke took over, GitHub prided itself on its independence from the larger Microsoft organization.
“Microsoft has not forgotten why we did the deal in the first place and what the important pillars of the deal are. The first and foremost principle is to put developers first. And that is what we do every day,” Dohmke said when I talked to him in 2022.
Daigle echoed this in our conversation.”Back then I said: ‘Let us prove it to you,'” he said in reference to the Microsoft acquisition. “I think we’ve done overall, a really good job of proving that we’re going to keep focusing on the developer.”
But 2025 is not 2018. Today’s GitHub is as much about Copilot as it is about hosting git repositories, and the resources needed to run Copilot are very different. As we reported earlier this month, GitHub is now in the process of moving its infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, for example. Daigle acknowledged as much. “There’s all kinds of bigger factors at play, like data centers and getting access to them and having what we need. And, you know, something like Azure makes sense. We need more compute. We’re growing simply too fast,” he told me.
But he also stressed that GitHub will use the tools Microsoft has to offer, but, when it makes sense, it will use tools that are not inside the Microsoft ecosystem, “where we think it gives us an advantage with developers, etc. — and that continues to remain true.”
“Hopefully, if we’re back together here in a year, everyone says: ‘Oh, yeah, it turned out.’ We were skeptical, but ultimately, GitHub continues to prove that folks like myself that have been through these transitions — and there’s many, many Hubbers that have been through all these transitions — are able to just continue to just put great tools in the hands of developers and let them use them and not lose that open source and developer ethos that’s kept us going for nearly 20 years.”
Building for Builders
One thing that has long remained true is that many other companies, including those that now compete with GitHub in the AI coding space like OpenAI and Anthropic, built on top of GitHub and often bring their tools directly into GitHub as well. Daigle did not seem worried about that.
“[GitHub is] such a unique opportunity to build something for builders that is just something that everyone is using,” he said. “Even if you’re using other tools, that’s great. Your code generally always kind of comes home to GitHub.”
Indeed, it seems like GitHub is actually looking for how it can bring more of these companies closer into its ecosystem.
“Throughout modern software development, more people building more tools is only a good thing for software developers,” he noted. “I know sometimes that comes off as like a throwaway, but it’s true. I don’t use the same coding editor that I used when I started. Things change. Things evolve, and that gets us to a better place where I’m able to write better code, or I get to solve problems I couldn’t solve before.”
GitHub, he said, wants to be the home for all developers — and that means giving developers choice, even if that sometimes leads to uncomfortable conversations in strategy sessions.
Developer Choice and Coding Agents
“Developer-first means when your employer buys GitHub, you, the developer, have to love to use GitHub, not just the person who had made the decision to buy it,” Daigle said. He stressed that is also means that if developers want to use other IDEs or other AI tools and coding agents, that’s fine, but GitHub will always create ways for those tools to freely use the users’ data in GitHub.
“Slowly but surely, that will continue to be the way we kind of write the next chapter of GitHub — we figure it out and we open it up, and developers will always choose, and fighting that is a losing battle,” he said.
Developers will always look for the best tools that let them do their job more effectively, but those regularly change. Right now, that competition is strongly focused on AI coding agents and while Copilot is a great business for GitHub, it often feels as if tools like Claude Code from Anthropic or OpenAI’s Codex have more mindshare than Copilot.
“With Copilot, we came out of the gate with this pair programmer concept, you know, and it was really good at autocomplete. And then, as other models came out, other tools came out, what we started to see was that each kind of tool and model started to specialize in a different way,” Daigle said.
Copilot’s Evolution: Beyond Code Completion
For the last two years or so, GitHub has been looking at how it can bring Copilot — and AI in general — to more surfaces and go beyond code generation. Daigle noted that one of the company’s goals is to take advantage of this latest generation of large language models (LLMs) to help developers across the software development life cycle (SDLC).
“The reality that we see is that it’s not like Copilot or an insert tool. It’s usually some mix and match where it’s tool A and B, tool B and Copilot, Copilot and tool A. Everyone’s using a multitude of tools. And for us, the questions is, well, if we can figure out how to make Copilot really, really good across not just one specialization but really as that horizontal layer across all the GitHub workflow, across more than just codegen — and then developers are going to continue to make choices. That really is the core kind of move that GitHub tends to make over the years.”
What’s most exciting to him, Daigle said, is how Copilot can take the context from what it knows about a developer and the work they do and create a really personalized experience.
GitHub Universe 2025
As for the upcoming Universe conference, Daigle noted that the focus will be on developer choice and that the audience should expect “another chapter of GitHub.”
While he didn’t quite give away the announcements, he did drop a few hints.
“We want to build on the foundation of collaboration that we’ve had, but also find ways to make it so that agents — and the tasks that you’re building with them — can live with you and work with you versus sort of always be this either side thing or this thing that you start and look at,” Daigle said. “And then, I feel like every year my favorite part of Universe is just talking about developer choice. I feel like every year we consistently surprise people by how much we care about that. And so I am also excited to just show everyone how we’re incredibly committed to letting devs choose — even if it surprises them, it doesn’t surprise us.”
You can find the full video of our conversation on YouTube.
