Microsoft’s GitHub chief is leaving, competitors ramps up in AI coding

Microsoft’s GitHub unit, which is dealing with a torrent of competitors from AI-powered coding instruments, is dropping its chief, and the corporate is not instantly naming a successor.

Thomas Dohmke, who has been CEO of GitHub since 2021, joined Microsoft in 2015 by means of the acquisition of his prior startup HockeyApp. Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, and Dohmke moved over to that enterprise as product chief in mid-2021. Months later, he replaced Nat Friedman as GitHub CEO.

In a memo to workers on Monday that Dohmke shared as a weblog publish, he stated he is leaving GitHub to “turn out to be a founder once more,” although he’ll be staying on by means of the tip of the 12 months “to assist information the transition.”

With Microsoft planning to speculate tens of billions of {dollars} a 12 months in synthetic intelligence infrastructure and growth, CEO Satya Nadella in January announced the formation of the CoreAI platform and instruments group beneath former Meta govt Jay Parikh. GitHub turned a part of that group.

“GitHub and its management workforce will proceed its mission as a part of Microsoft’s CoreAI group, with extra particulars shared quickly,” Dohmke wrote.

A GitHub spokesperson declined to offer extra particulars.

In 2021, beneath Friedman’s management, GitHub launched Copilot in collaboration with Microsoft and OpenAI. The providing, which might counsel code for builders so as to add to their tasks, was utilized by quite a lot of prospects, with a watch towards making their engineers extra productive.

GitHub claims to have over 150 million registered builders, up from 73 million in October 2021.

Whereas GitHub loved a head begin in AI on account of its recognition as a code-sharing platform, a number of fast-growing opponents have emerged on this planet of so-called vibe coding, which counts on AI fashions to shortly produce code for apps and web sites. They embrace Cursor creator Anysphere, Replit and Windsurf, whose CEO was hired by Google final month as a part of a $2.4 billion AI expertise deal.

A Stack Overflow developer survey carried out in Might and June confirmed that round 76% of respondents have been utilizing Microsoft’s Visible Studio Code as a code editor. Roughly 18% stated they have been relying on Cursor, almost 10% have been utilizing Anthropic’s Claude Code and 5% talked about Windsurf.

Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf have been all absent in the identical part of final 12 months’s survey.

Microsoft continues to be seeing progress from Copilot. Nadella stated final month that 20 million folks have been utilizing it, with the variety of Copilot Enterprise prospects growing 75% quarter over quarter.

“I’m extra satisfied than ever that the world will quickly see one billion builders enabled by billions of AI brokers, every imprinting human ingenuity into a brand new gold rush of software program,” Dohmke wrote. “When that day comes, we’ll know the place the trail started: with GitHub.”

WATCH: The rise of AI ‘vibe coding’