On August 11 (local time), GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke suddenly announced his resignation. Coincidentally, the very next day GitHub Search experienced an outage, with the failure rate rising. The incident lasted for three and a half hours.

"Enterprise users, remember to email your sales representative and demand that they provide you with the service availability data you're contractually entitled to. Unless you proactively ask, they won't do it, because they hope you won't notice these outages. This puts a lot of internal pressure on them, as they have no automated reporting mechanism in this regard," user everfrustrated reminded. "This is the only way to force any change. GitHub is hands down the most unreliable SaaS product. Not a week goes by without us being affected by downtime. Their reputation is already in shambles."

"Given the ongoing reliability issues and the CEO's resignation, it feels like now is the perfect time for competitors to start grabbing market share. I genuinely hope to see this happen!" one commenter said. "For a long time, I thought these core companies were untouchable, and I'm honestly impressed by their ability to destroy consumer trust."

Some joked: "Day one of the new management structure, and already running into trouble."

Another added, "Compared to when GitHub was first sold to Microsoft, now we have decent alternatives like Tangled, GitLab, Codeberg (Forgejo), and Gitea. While back then it was indeed convenient to consolidate the entire FOSS world onto a single development platform, I'm actually more excited about the potential for more innovation in this space going forward."01 GitHub may no longer be programmers' "paradise"

01 GitHub May No Longer Be a "Paradise" for Programmers

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Since Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub in 2018, GitHub has operated as an independent company with its own CEO and executives. But starting next year, GitHub seems set to be more fully integrated into Microsoft's organizational structure.

Thomas, who has served as GitHub's CEO for four years, announced in a farewell letter to employees that he will remain until the end of this year before stepping down to once again become a "founder," seeking new opportunities outside of Microsoft and GitHub.

According to foreign media reports, Microsoft will not directly fill the CEO position at GitHub. Instead, GitHub's leadership will report more directly to Microsoft's CoreAI team. In his letter, Dohmke also stated, "As part of Microsoft's CoreAI division, GitHub and its leadership team will continue to fulfill their mission, with more details to be announced soon." In other words, GitHub will no longer have a single leader or CEO.

This leadership change comes at a time when GitHub faces increasingly fierce competition from companies like Google and Cursor. However, Dohmke struck an optimistic tone in his letter: "With more than 1 billion repositories and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub today is stronger than ever. Each year, we see more open-source projects emerge and contributions grow. Just in the past year, the number of AI-related projects has doubled. And our influence across companies of all sizes is unmatched in the market."

Given Microsoft's massive investment in AI-powered coding tools like GitHub Copilot, bringing GitHub more directly into its AI ecosystem seems logical. Previously, as GitHub's CEO, Dohmke already reported to Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft's Developer Division, who in turn reported to Jay Parikh, head of CoreAI.

It remains unclear whether Dohmke's departure and the elimination of the CEO role will significantly impact GitHub's operations or the products it develops and maintains.

Some netizens argue that even under the previous CEO, GitHub had already become a channel for Azure and AI initiatives. Now, with a new organizational structure, it will move forward at full speed.

Microsoft's CoreAI division itself is only a few months old. In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced its formation, writing in a blog post: "At the end of the day, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries mean nothing to our customers and competitors. Our success in the next phase will depend on having the best AI platform, tools, and infrastructure."

The CoreAI team, led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh, combines Microsoft's Platforms & Tools division with the Developer Division teams, focusing on building AI platforms and tools for Microsoft and its customers. Copilot has been named one of its key focus areas. Expanding GitHub Copilot has long been part of its responsibilities.

Parikh, who joined Microsoft in October 2024 and reports directly to CEO Satya Nadella, has built his career around engineering and product development. "He has an impressive track record of building and scaling technology teams that serve both enterprise customers and consumers. He has deep ties to the startup and venture capital ecosystem, and his leadership experience at Akamai and Ning will bring valuable perspectives to Microsoft," Satya said of him.

Earlier this year, Parikh outlined his vision of an "AI agent factory" in an interview, and explained how he convinced Microsoft's Developer Division to adopt AI technology. "Just as Bill Gates once envisioned Microsoft as a place where software developers built a huge amount of software, I want our platform to be a tool any company or organization can use to turn themselves into their own agent factory," he said.

Thus, some speculate that GitHub may become Microsoft's "arsenal" in the AI era — a component of Parikh's agent factory. This would mean Microsoft will integrate GitHub more deeply into its AI strategy, though whether this can spark new creativity remains to be seen.

"If you still think of GitHub as a paradise for programmers, this transformation may mean you'll never go back," one netizen commented.

Meanwhile, developers' confidence in Microsoft's open-source efforts has long been shaky.

"They had a brief golden era in recent history, especially in the mid-2010s. With .NET Core 1–3 — a modern, open-source, cross-platform .NET clearly built 'by developers, for developers.' Add VSCode to the mix, and things looked really good. But by the time .NET 5 came around, if you looked closely, they reverted to the same old bad habits — like shoehorning WinForms and WPF together. The whole project shifted from 'by developers, for developers' to the classic top-down management style," developer Xelbair said.

"VSCode is another strange case — it looks open source, but it really isn't. The version you compile yourself doesn't fully come from the same codebase, and if you build or fork it yourself, you can't legally access the official extensions," Xelbair added.

"Microsoft's approach to open source is fundamentally at odds with the flashy 'Microsoft ❤️ Open Source' slogan they've been promoting. They may have moved past the Ms-PL era, but they've repeatedly tried to co-opt or even hijack open-source projects. While that's understandable to some extent, the simple fact remains: their core products — Visual Studio, Office, Windows, and, worse still, their older versions — are not open source at all. That directly contradicts their supposed 'love for open source.'"

02 Release of New Features Met with Complaints, Dohmke Reveals Heavy Constraints

In fact, Dohmke was already the second CEO of GitHub after Microsoft's acquisition, taking over the role at the end of 2021 following the departure of former CEO Nat Friedman. Prior to that, he had served as GitHub's Chief Product Officer.

In June 2021, Friedman led GitHub and OpenAI to jointly launch Copilot. After Dohmke took office, he continuously iterated and upgraded it, adding support for multi-language models as well as an "agent" feature that attempts to complete natural language requests in the background while users are occupied with other tasks. Over the past year, Copilot has become Microsoft's first multi-model solution, launched in collaboration with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.

According to Dohmke's latest disclosure, GitHub Copilot's user base has reached 20 million, up from 15 million three months ago, and this figure includes both paid and free users. The last time GitHub disclosed paid user numbers was in the second quarter of 2024, when paid subscriptions stood at only 1.3 million.

However, Copilot's development has not been without problems. Earlier this year, Copilot accidentally leaked private repositories from several major companies. In addition, a recent Stack Overflow survey showed that while usage of AI-assisted coding tools has increased, trust in their accuracy may be declining. The survey noted this was because such tools often provide "solutions that look correct but actually aren't," leading to additional troubleshooting and debugging work.

Some users believe GitHub's earlier approach of excellent and reliable progressive enhancement was far more impressive. Now, some AI features are being pushed forcefully, drawing complaints from developers. One user agreed with this sentiment: "This site is almost unusable on my phone, constantly crashing. It wasn't like this a few years ago."

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In an article announcing user numbers, Dohmke once wrote, "The true measure of a company lies not in its moments of spotlight, but in its resilience under pressure. Even with heavy constraints, we've proven that persistence leads to victory." On a podcast last week, Dohmke revealed the various "constraints" he faced while leading GitHub.

First, he mentioned constraints on budget and headcount, stating that whether it's a 10-person startup, a 3,000-person GitHub, or a 200,000-person Microsoft, trade-offs must be made. Apple has a famous saying: "Behind every 'yes,' there are a thousand 'no's."

He went on to say, "Our backlog will never be finished." Many requests existed long before AI came along — user feedback, requests to add features in GitHub Issues or Projects, and so on. There's even a running joke in the industry: whenever new feedback comes in, if you scroll back months or years, you'll always find someone suggesting the exact same idea. After all, users are developers, and there's always someone who thinks of what others once did or suggests improvements. When changes are made, some people will complain on X: "GitHub made this the default, that's the dumbest thing ever," while another group praises it: "This is the smartest decision."

"These years, we've constantly weighed trade-offs between 'which innovations to pursue,' 'what to follow others in doing,' and 'which things should be collaborations rather than built ourselves.' Copilot's development has gone relatively well, although there were bumps in the road, and some strategic decisions didn't lead us in the right direction," Dohmke said.

03 Restarting the Entrepreneurial Journey, Says "Agents Find Bugs Better Than Humans"

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Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

Not long ago, Dohmke discussed GitHub and the future direction of AI on a podcast, reflecting deeply on industry competition and GitHub's role in the future of software development.

Dohmke believes that AI has become an irreversible trend. "Over the past 50 years, the amount of code we deal with has grown exponentially, and it will continue to grow in the future. Humans are not good at handling exponential growth. In the future, the quality of code generated by Agents will surpass that of humans because they can scale infinitely — Agents can find bugs that humans don't have time to look for."

The problem is: can we trust this code? Dohmke explained that this goes back to GitHub's original purpose. GitHub was built for human collaboration: I have an open-source project, you fork it, make changes, send a pull request, I review and give feedback, and if it's good, I merge it. This is human-to-human quality control. "The same process can work for human-Agent collaboration, but if you have thousands of Agents, you'll need to redesign it. This will be the core competitive edge of development tools: letting Agents generate far more code than humans, while ensuring that humans remain in control — so that production code (handling user data, billing, etc.) is reliable, high-quality, and secure. The challenge of the future is not how much code Agents can write, but how much Agent-generated code we dare to put into production systems."

Therefore, Dohmke suggested that there will be two types of developers in the future: one group that builds and verifies systems using models and Agents; and another that still prefers writing code themselves, using AI only for tasks they don't want to do (like writing tests and documentation), freeing up time for work they enjoy. "The core question is how you allocate your 8 hours: to creativity and innovation, or just to chores. Today, regardless of company size, most developers probably spend only 4 hours a day (or less) writing code; the rest of the time is spent in meetings, answering emails, reviewing others' code, or updating servers."

Facing the rapid rise of competitors such as Cursor and WindSurf, Dohmke stated that building an AI programming tool today requires supporting multiple models, having a developer-recognized 'best' model, allowing users to bring their own models, supporting Agent mode in IDEs, or enabling Agents to be deployed in the cloud. "We can both compete and benefit from how these companies are driving the overall growth of the software ecosystem."

Now that Dohmke is leaving and restarting his entrepreneurial journey, this may bring more competition to Microsoft's AI business. In his farewell letter, Dohmke also announced his upcoming startup plans. "After such a long time, my original entrepreneurial drive has been pulling at me, so I've decided to leave GitHub and once again become a founder."

According to what he wrote in the letter, "The world will soon witness billions of developers being empowered by billions of AI Agents, with each AI Agent imprinting human wisdom into software's new gold rush."

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