GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke on Building Copilot, and the the Future of Software Development

GithHub invented collaborative coding and in the process changed how open source projects, startups and eventually enterprises write code. GitHub Copilot is the first blockbuster product built on top of OpenAI’s GPT models. It now accounts for more than 40 percent of GitHub revenue growth for an annual revenue run rate of $2 billion. Copilot itself is already a larger business than all of GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it in 2018.

We talk to CEO Thomas Dohmke about how a small team at GitHub built on top of GPT-3 and quickly created a product that developers love—and can’t live without. Thomas describes how the product has grown from simple autocomplete to a fully featured workspace for enterprise teams. He also believes that tools like Copilot will bring the power of coding to a billion developers by 2030.

Hosted by: Stephanie Zhan and Sonya Huang, Sequoia Capital 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Nat Friedman: Former Microsoft VP (and now investor) who came up with the idea that Microsoft should buy GitHub
• Oege de Moor: Github developer (and now founder of XBOW) who came up with the idea of using GPT-3 for code and went on to create Copilot
• Alex Graveley: principal engineer and Chief Architect for Copilot (now CEO of Minion.ai) who came up with the name Copilot (because his boss, Nat Firedman, is an amateur pilot)
• Productivity Assessment of Neural Code Completion: Original GitHub research paper on the impact of Copilot on Developer productivity
• Escaping a room in Minecraft with an AI-powered NPC: Recent Minecraft AI assistant demo from Microsoft
• With AI, anyone can be a coder now: TED2024 talk by Thomas Dohmke
• JFrog: The software supply chain platform that GitHub just partnered with

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:01:18 - Getting started with code

00:03:43 - Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub

00:11:40 - Evolving Copilot beyond autocomplete

00:14:18 - In hindsight, you can always move faster

00:15:56 - Building on top of OpenAI

00:20:21 - The latest metrics

00:22:11 - The surprise of Copilot’s impact

00:25:11 - Teaching kids to code in the age of Copilot

00:26:38 - The momentum mindset

00:29:46 - Agents vs Copilots

00:32:06 - The Roadmap

00:37:31 - Making maintaining software easier

00:38:48 - The creative new world

00:42:38 - The AI 10x software engineer

00:45:12 - Creativity and systems engineering in AI

00:48:55 - What about COBOL?

00:50:23 - Will GitHub build its own models?

00:57:19 - Rapid incubation at GitHub Next

00:59:21 - The future of AI?

01:03:18 - Advice for founders

01:05:08 - Lightning round