Intro0:00
I just find that the folks that came from a different career, went to school for something else, went off and did this random thing and then became a software dev, or were a dev, did a random thing, came back. Learning that extra set of information, learning those extra skills, and now having the power of an AI where I can crank up 15 agents on Saturday, you know, while my kids are doing lacrosse, uh, that's, like, really powerful, and I think it gets me back to that feeling of, like, creation, and it's very hard to, like, replicate that in most other senses.
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Okay, we're here with Kyle Daigle, CEO of GitHub. Welcome.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
You're not just CEO of GitHub. People know you as that.
Yeah.
You have a new role.
Yeah, so I have an expanded role now. I mean, we've been working-- Uh, I've been working at GitHub for 13 years-
Yeah
... and doing, uh, you know, all things developer. Joined as a developer myself, and now, uh, I'm also responsible as the CMO of Developer for Microsoft. And so all the kind of learnings and passion for developers and how we work with them and how we communicate and, uh, you know, how we bring our products to market, we're also bringing that expertise, you know, to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and, uh, and helping, uh, every developer that uses a Microsoft, you know, product or would like to, uh, to have a sort of similar experience that they've had with, you know, GitHub, uh, over the years. So it's a big different, uh, role in some ways, but it's also just building on the experience that, you know, I've had at GitHub of just sort of tell the truth, be authentic, show people how to use it, and then let the, you know, products speak for themselves. Now just doing that with, uh, all of Microsoft.
Yeah. And, uh, we're, we'll be releasing this in conjunction with Build.
Yeah.
You got lots of stuff planned, uh, and we can sort of touch on that whenever it's appropriate.
Yeah.
Uh, I think one of the interesting things is I rarely meet a COO who's also a CMO.
Yeah, yeah.
I think you're a very outward facing and y- you're very confident publicly. Um, that's rare. Like, do, uh, do you actually view yourself as COO? Like, what's-
Yeah, I mean, you know-
What is your thing?
I think for me, like, it's been funny. The titles have always been, uh, like... A- a-- Have always felt a little strange to me. I mean, I joined GitHub as a developer, you know? I mean, I wrote so much of the-
Let, let's bring that up.
Yeah.
What-- Yeah.
You know what-
You wrote the backend?
Yeah, I was going through, like, uh... I was going through, uh, some old photos, uh, when, you know, folks were talking about, you know, how things were being built or how there was a build GitHub. I built, uh, uh, uh, web hooks and worked with teams building the API, built the platform layer. Anything that integrated with GitHub, uh, up until really 2018, I, uh, w- built or ran the engineering teams. Uh, and that's kinda where my, like, the beginning of my passion always was, was helping people build things, deliver them to, like, their customers. Uh, and so being a developer, building for developers was always super unique. In a-- I think as my role expanded, it became, you know, my ability to talk to not just developers, but also enterprise customers or, you know, business leaders-
Yeah
... and have this, like, translation layer. Uh, and then through all those years, GitHub has always operated pretty uniquely. Like, post-pandemic, working remotely was not as novel as it was when, you know, GitHub, uh, uh, you know, started in 2008. But all that expertise of running remote teams, doing it well, became this sort of bigger role, ultimately turning into the COO role of how do we operate GitHub in the way that GitHub's always operated after the Microsoft acquisition.
Yeah.
Uh, and kinda so on from there. So I mean, like, for me, I think the-- I've-- I still code. I love coding. But the problem has always been, like, people. It's a much harder problem to both support our own employees, a harder problem to communicate to developers and enterprise buyers what we're building, why it matters, 'cause those are two very different messages. And so getting to work in the mix of COO, CMO, also just being a dev, uh, I think is what's kept me at GitHub for, for so long.
Yeah. Apparently you have-- Your commits have gone up.
AI Leadership4:58
Yeah.
Uh-
Yeah.
What's this? What's going on?
Yeah, I mean, or, or, uh, or, or he's called me out pretty, uh, pretty aggressively. So I mean, you know, I think-- I mean, as you can imagine, right, like, you can see my, like, normal era of being a dev- ... in the, you know, 2013, 2014 era, and then moving into management, and then ultimately the COO role. I think what you see there is me, like, really getting back to coding thanks to AI, you know? Uh, I-- Similar to, like, attaching problems between, you know, how to market and how to operate a business and how to code, I find, like, building agents and workflows that are connecting very disparate problems to be what's driving this.
Yeah.
So that's like, some of it's writing software. A lot of it is, like, connecting a ton of s- different data sources to, like, help me out. Uh, uh, but that is completely me, you know, uh, really, really diving in, uh, on the AI side, um, and trying out our tools, trying out everyone's tools. Like, um, but building for me- Building for the, like, non-technical leader, the non-technical, you know?
Yeah.
And how we're, uh, able to use these tools more than just the simple, like, call and response that I think, you know, a lot of the, like, non-technical, your employers, like, you have to get-- you have to use AI, and so everyone uses, like, ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whatever. To really get into, like, how is this gonna help me out, it-- I find that it's not the, "I need to write a blog post. I need to..." You know, those simple examples. Helping people find the workflows of like, "Okay, I need you to go through all the PRs today. I need you to go through everything that we've posted online. I need you to go through what we've did the last, you know, three months. Go through all of my Obsidian notes for any mentions of this, then go through my transcripts at work." We, we, uh, use, uh, Teams, so, like, using WorkIQ, go call that MCP server, grab all the transcripts, go through all the Slack, and then build me out the plan of, like, what this week's messaging actually was. That's something that was, like, impossible because for me, I find AI, you know, like, what most of this, like, launch here is, is actually, like, less building forward. It's actually, like, a recursive loop backwards. I'm always looking at what had happened first. Like, go back through the week and tell me what we did, what worked, what didn't work.
Mm.
You know? And then tell me in the next, you know, three or four days, what would you tweak based on, you know, this sort of, like, looking backwards and then looking ahead a little bit. I find that to be so much more valuable, especially for, like, non-technical because that retrospection is actually ver- LLMs are very good at that, you know? Like, finding all the patterns, pulling them out, and then applying that retrospection to just a couple of days or just, like, a short period of time. Uh, is all a bunch of apps that I've built and launched, like, a bunch of, uh, internal tools. I use the new, uh, GitHub Copilot app, the desktop app with workflows.
Yes.
Every time I crack open my laptop, it's running workflows for me. Uh, it's just a ton of different stuff and of course it all ends up on, it all ends up on GitHub.
Uh, of course. That's where, that's where, uh- ... stuff is hosted. Uh, man, there's so much to ask you. Uh, I was gonna leave the, the how do you run a company with AI-
Yeah
... thing at the end. I have to ask one, one-- double click one thing.
Yeah.
You said, like, y- you are looking back at the week.
Mm-hmm.
You're, you're understanding what, uh, what happened. When you say we-
Yeah
... that's 3,000 people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How?
I mean, I think, you know, uh, when we started rolling out AI internally beyond engineering, right? Um, w- one of the things that I was really, really, uh, passionate about is, like, we have to do this in a way where no one has to change how they work. I don't wanna have to teach you a tool. I don't wanna have to teach you something new. And so for us, we tried out a few tools. Most of them don't work because I gotta get you on board, you know? I gotta teach you how to use it. What we've actually ended up doing is we've built, like, a set of, uh, uh, you know, skills internally. We have, like, we each have our set of skills, and we've just been distributing even to the non-technical folks the CLI, and then effectively we're just giving it access to, like, read about everything that we're writing. So that's for us, that's usually GitHub, um, Teams, email, and Slack. Um, so Teams for, uh, video chat generally speaking.
Teams and Slack?
Yeah. I mean, so we use Teams for video communication, like, but we don't use it for chat. W- we-- GitHub for a long, long history, right?
What's Slack?
We always talk about chat ops and, like, everything is built into Slack.
I see.
Like, every command, every flow.
So even though you have been acquired for, like, I don't know, eight years now-
Yeah.
Uh-
Yeah. I mean, we still-
You still use Slack?
Yes. I mean, it's a purpose-built tool for us, and I think the reality is that moving off of it would be so, like, bluntly expensive, you know? Simply because all the tooling is, uh, baked in with that paradigm. And they both have their pros and cons, like, but they don't work the same way, like, at all.
Wow.
Yeah. I mean, we still use a bunch of different tools-
Right
... because it's, you know, the purpose-built tools that-
Okay
... uh, we need. And then-
Well, the, the same doesn't go for the rest of Microsoft presumably.
I mean, like, the, like, you know, various teams, like, operate in various-
They, they make their own decisions
... yeah, various ways, you know?
Yeah. Yeah.
Um, uh, I think it just matters what you're trying to, like, what you're trying to do.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, but we do, you know, we do work across kind of every tool that we use and then, uh, by giving everyone access to all of that context and, like, um, uh, the new, uh, like WorkIQ MCP server, which is quite cool if you do live in the M365, like, world. Uh, I can ask it all these backwards-facing questions and it's incredibly important for our teams that are working remotely. You know, there's a lot of stuff you miss when you're not in an office, and we are spread out all over the world. So most of that is looking back. And then we post, uh, we post either auto- automatically into, like, uh, GitHub issues or discussions, um, these sorts of, like, findings or, like, our industry reports. Like, what's happening this morning, today, yesterday. A little automation gets run. We'll use the app. We might use GitHub Actions, like, with, uh, our agentic workflows just to go do that run, and then we push it into GitHub and w- we keep having a conversation. So usually for us it's about that sort of, like, looking back, looking forward, uh, uh, on the non-technical side. Um, and then of course for a lot of those folks it's also, you know, building an app, pushing it to GitHub pages or pushing it somewhere to host it, uh, et cetera. Um, but it's just, like, enabling everyone with that power of it's gonna take me a week to
figure this out. Instead we're going, "Okay, like, I built a skill. Let's put it into a repo. We'll all share that skill together, and then we'll use the CLI or now the app-"
Yeah
... "just to run it."
Micro-Skills11:44
All right. I, I think, I think we're going straight into, like, the, the team management-
Yeah
... and productivity thing. Uh, I think a lot of people are getting various levels of LLM psychosis. Um, how do you manage the bloat of skills? Like, everyone-
Mm-hmm
... has their thing and-
Yeah
... they're, like, trying to promote it to the rest of their peers in their org, right? And obviously whoever becomes a skill influencer internally becomes, like, an AI leader, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of sorts.
Yeah.
Uh, I assume you have those.
Yeah. I mean, like, I think we have-
And I assume it's a mess, like a... Like-
Yeah. I mean, there's like, I, like, I think the reality is there's two pieces. Like, first is- I think that we're ending the era of these like massive, beautiful, perfect skills that are just like not any of those things, you know? Uh, 'cause for a while, right, like every, every tweet every day is like, "Go download the skills, the perfectly managed thing to do this entire workflow." And I think that like what we've found in what-- I was just with my team, um, uh, this week, and we were talking about the skill side, and we're really talking about these like incredibly micro skills that are just doing one thing for us very, very well-
Yeah
... versus a skill that's gonna do, like I said, that full report. That doesn't really exist on our side anymore, you know? It's usually like, uh, how do... like a single skill that's going to identify the most important marketing information given any MCP server. Like this is the most important thing. Less about stitch a bunch of tools together and have it produce this mega output because then weeks go by, months go by, things change, and you wanna tweak-
Yeah, it's pretty-
... your mega skill and you're screwed.
Yeah.
You know? You can't do that. Uh, and so now we're really just talking about, um, like the Legos we're using and j- letting the instruction book, you know, be something we're all putting together. Whereas I think a lotta AI skills for a while have been that mega, you know, instruction book style.
Yeah. Uh, I've, uh, thought a lot about Postel's law. I don't know if that's a term that, uh, means things to folks. It's the idea that you should be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you output, right? And I think that's like a good framing principle for skills. Uh, this is my skills obviously on GitHub.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh, I feel like everyone should have like... You know how like some repos-
Yeah
... in GitHub are special repos?
Sure, sure.
I feel like we should sort of reify the, the slash skills and everyone like give it a- some kind of special presentation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyway, so, um, yeah, this is one of those like download-
Yep
... uh, download anything, transcribe anything, and then you can string together the atomic skills that do one thing well-
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm
... into like some kind of orchestration skill that calls other skills.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
I assume, uh, does that match?
Uh, yeah. I th- I, I think so. I think that the, the-
Summarize anything.
Totally. Like I think the... For me, summarizing something for, uh, like, you know, I do communications and PR and analyst relations and marketing and customer activities, and so my summarize everything is very different for each one of those like contexts.
Mm-hmm. Mm.
You know what I mean? 'Cause if I'm summarizing something for an analyst, that's a very different thing than, um, probably how I'm gonna summarize something for like a customer meeting or an engagement.
Yeah.
So that's, I think, like the difference when we're talking about the, um, like the tools I might use on Saturday, you know, or the skills I might use on a Saturday when it's just for Kyle. Yeah, those are kinda like they have an atomic actual tool underneath or maybe skill, and then Kyle cares about X. But I think when we're talking about work and enabling the, uh, you know, the marketers, communicators there, it's the atomic this is what good summarization is, and then this is what I care about as for marketing, for communications-
Yeah
... for whatever. And that I think is like the interesting matrix problem when we go from like a developer set of concerns to all kinds of different professions, is that what that word means to me is different than it means to you, is different than it means to the, you know, analyst or the salesperson, and that's where I think the matrix mess is that we're starting to like still starting to find.
Yeah.
It's not these mega skills-
Yeah
... but they're all just slight permutations, but those permutations are really important. It's the difference between someone reading this and going, "Did AI make this?" You know what I mean? Or like, "This makes total sense, and I, I would expect this when I'm giving a briefing to Gartner or like whatever else."
Yeah. I think a beauty of it maybe is that you don't have to be that careful about what goes in there.
Yeah.
It doesn't have to exactly fit, uh, as long as it like roughly is contained in there. I used to complain about plugin hell basically.
Yeah.
Like when you have a framework and then you have t- 100 things that you need to integrate, everyone do- does like the... GitHub used to be bloated full of these things.
Yeah, yeah.
And now we don't need them anymore-
Yeah, yeah
... 'cause now you just use skills.
Yeah. Oh, and like I think the m- most magical thing is the just that like I can just also crack it open. Like-
Yeah
... you know, like yes, I could go like, you know, change the how the plugin is coded or like I could go, uh, you know, do that now with AI, but I think there's just something more magical about getting a response back and being like, "That's not right," and then you just crack the skill open, you just type-
Yeah, yeah
... English words, you know, and it's different. Uh, that, that, that building block is just, uh, I think very unique. Um, once, uh, once I get everyone to kinda understand how to best, uh, you know, how to best make those changes, uh, uh, you know, to get the most power out of them.
Is there a, you know, you, you have a, your peer group-
Yeah
... of people like you. Is there a common framing for... Something I'm feeling is which is true, is that, uh, is this a golden age for former developers who are now in leadership? Right?
Dev Leaders17:07
Yeah.
Because you can wield the tools, you would know the right words, you are maybe not too close to the details.
Sure.
Doesn't matter.
Yeah.
But like you're more effective than someone who doesn't come from that background.
I think that like the secret has always been your ability to identify patterns and solve problems. And I think that, you know, for folks that like myself that don't code day to day anymore, that has made me successful as a developer, made me successful as a COO, now CMO. And so now that I have access to Git and write code, I'm s- now applying that sort of like pattern finding and problem solving, and I know enough still, you know, about how to then go and say, "Oh, I wanna make an app, but I don't wanna, you know, break into jail or create something that's not gonna be able to work or to be deployed scale or whatever." Uh, that ability to apply all that additional business knowledge, you know-
Yeah
... and still code I think is what makes that so interesting to me. Slightly different than I think some of the other like technical leaders that became business leaders and now are going back to their apps and updating them. Good for them, you know? But I think that the more, much more interesting thing is, well, now I have this whole new set of expertise over 10 plus years. Why not apl- take that And use that as a developer with these AI tools. So I definitely think that makes me more powerful, but I think that's true for, like, every dev as well. M- you know, most of the dev friends I still have also have some other underlying skill and passion. You know? There's really talented, very, you know, kind of linear computer science software devs, absolutely. I just find that the folks that came from a different career, went to school for something else, went off and did this random thing and then became a software dev, or were a dev, did a random thing, came back. Learning that extra set of information, learning those extra skills, and now having the power of an AI where I can crank up 15 agents on Saturday, you know, while my kids are doing lacrosse. Uh, that's, like, really powerful. And I think it gets me back to that feeling of, like, creation, and it's very hard to, uh, uh, like, replicate that in most other senses. You
know?
Yeah.
That first time you build an app and you click it and you show someone, like, that's magical.
Yeah.
And so being able to do that, not just in code, but across all kinds of different assets, like that's, that's huge. Uh, we were doing, we're doing our, like, um, every year we do our revenue planning. You know, we talk about, you know, okay, what is it gonna look like for next year? And of course, as you imagine, there's, uh, slideshows everywhere, you know, talking about what are we gonna talk about, what's the narrative, et cetera. And so as you said, you know, I'm like, "Okay, well, I could probably just, like, build something to build this, and then that way I don't have to go build the whole spreadsheet or I have to pass it to my team." So we w- we went through this process, and I got all the information and used the skills I mentioned. I built, like, a little app just to make it s- so I could look at some of the information in a SQLite database, um, more easily. And I ultimately built this entire presentation without touching any of it, and I was like, "Okay, I'm just gonna present this to our CRO, the CFO, their teams," without mentioning I'd built it with AI. Uh, I, like, built a skill to make it look very much not AI driven. Uh-
Nice
... just g- not pretty.
Like a design? Yeah.
Not pretty.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But just, like, very clearly not AI. Like, kinda like don't do anything interesting.
That's, yeah, that is valuable.
Just go... Exactly.
Yeah.
We did the whole thing through. It used my notes from Obsidian, it used all the context I mentioned before, the plans, and never came up once that it was AI generated.
Yeah, 'cause it didn't matter.
Never, never once. D-
Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. It didn't matter. And so now I take-
It's just a tool
... I can take that tool and go, "Look, I don't want you to go build slideshows."
Yeah.
They're just helping us share information with each other. If this thing can do it- ... with a little bit of crafting from you and then we can look at it together, awesome.
Yeah.
There's no value in all that extra work.
Yeah.
I think that the ability to, like, make it look humanly bad and, you know, like, and build a little app to, like, manipulate the data-
Yeah
... I think is part of, like, uh, that upside for devs that are now in leadership roles. Because, like, the thing that I feel like, uh, like I said before, this-- that's all a people, that's all a people problem. I know if you've used a coworker or not to build a slide deck unless you spent a bunch of time to, to not do it.
I know, but like it was so, like, I think there's a certain charm to just being blatantly AI.
Sure, sure.
And so I think that you're like, "Well, you're just honest about, like-
Yeah, yeah, yeah
... there may be mistakes here that I cannot vouch for."
Yep.
Um, so, you know, how much value is, is there? But anyway, like I, I think, actually the, the real question I wanna ask is, like, there's a... You were a chief of staff-
Yeah, yeah
Chief of Staff21:42
... to Thomas.
Yes, yeah.
And in, in, in the pre-AI world, the, that job would've been a chief of staff job of like-
Yeah, yeah
... "Can you prep me these slides and all that?"
Yeah, yeah.
And now, now you do it yourself.
Yeah, I mean, like, uh, I still, I still have a chief of staff.
Okay.
Because, like, the difference is, like, it's sort of the, the, the discussion every time we, you know, have some sort of technology, uh, you know, evolution is it's not that the, the jobs, like, the roles don't all go away, they just change, you know?
Mm-hmm.
And so yeah, I don't have someone spending all their time building out slides for me and presentations 'cause I don't need that anymore. But now I need that person that is able to go and find all the different connections between humans in those discussions to help me find out, okay, I should be meeting with this group and this team, and they have an opportunity, and I'm gonna be in San Francisco today, I'm gonna be in Seattle tomorrow. Those sorts of like, um, human connection a- uh, aspects are still incredibly valuable and has always been a big part of that, like, chief of staff role.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but now just like, uh, you know, chiefs of staff are not opening up, like, letters to process, they're doing emails. You know what I mean? It's the same thing, and now they're, they're not building out as many of these presentations because they have the, you know, the ability to have a, a AI take it on for, uh, and share that with me and great. Like, let's keep moving 'cause it's allowing us to go faster and make better decisions more, more quickly.
Yeah. Awesome. Um, well, so we can dive into more sort of, uh-
Yeah
... productivity insights as you go. I did want to do a little bit of a brief history of how they could help.
GitHub Roots23:12
Yeah, sure.
Uh, because, like, we, we started here.
Yeah.
And then you also involved the npm acquisition.
Yep, yep.
And I did, I do wanna touch upon that.
Yep.
Uh, and then more recently, I just wanna bring up to present day where we're having uptime issues-
Yeah
... which transparently we, we've already, already-
Yeah, yeah
... uh, addressed publicly, but we'll, we'll discuss in the pod.
Sure.
Uh, did I miss anything? Like what, any other major highlights? Obviously, it's, it's a lot of years to cover.
Yeah, no. I mean, like, uh, the, I think one of, uh, one highlight was w- uh, right before the acquisition closed in 2018, I got to launch the first version of Actions-
Oh
... uh, at GitHub Universe. Uh, so it was O-
They're that young?
Yeah, it was October of 2018, I think. Yeah, yeah.
Gee, Jesus.
Yeah, yeah. I got to... I was the engineering leader on that project and got to launch that. Uh, and then yeah, we did acquisitions of, you know, npm, like you said, uh, Semmle, Dependabot-
Yep
... you know, Pul Panda, like a whole bunch of things. That was a big-
Pul Panda.
Right. Uh, uh, Abi, uh, Abi is doing well.
DX.
Uh, D-
Holy cow
... doing well on DX. Uh, you know, I, and like that was a, that was the big shift, uh, after the acquisition. I had to join the sort of business side.
Okay. Uh, so I, I, I need to hit you on, on some of these things-
Yeah, of course
... 'cause you were there.
Yeah, yeah.
Right? And how, how often do I get to talk to someone who was there? Um- But yeah, Actions, is that the number one source of security issues on GitHub?
Oh, sh-- I mean, I think that the number one source of, uh, security issues is probably like, uh, the, the literal code in everyone's, like, underlying repositories. I would say back further than that is, uh, if you remember, like, I had a sh- like, in this graph was, this is... I, I, I didn't say this before. This is ultimately webhooks.
Yes. You, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like circa whatever it was.
Yeah, it says Hookshot.
I forget. Yeah, yeah.
Hookshot in there.
Yeah, Hookshot's in there. And so, like, back then, it says GitHub Services. Do you see, uh, it says Hookshot, Hookshot FE for frontend, and then it says GitHub Services. GitHub Services back in the old days, right, you'd like... We had a repository that was Ruby code, and you could write any Ruby code in there, and then we would execute that-
Hmm
... on your behalf-
Hmm
... as a service, and then that way, you know, if, uh, if an, if you were trying to integrate with something, it didn't w- you know, we would run it for you.
And of course, no containers 'cause-
N- no, 'cause it was-
Wanna do containers
... 2014, you know?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Like, uh, and so there was some isolation obviously, but it was mostly the separations on the server level. Uh, that's, like, an example as long as the very old version of Pages, which ran on its own containerization infrastructure, not on Actions.
Which is, like, all-time great product.
I believe Pages powers the internet, like, uh, you know, at this point to some degree.
Yeah.
Uh, those were places where, like, clearly there were no, like, you know, uh, like, uh, uh, issues, like, to my knowledge. But it was those things where I'm looking at and going, "Okay, well, like, we can't be running arbitrary Ruby code," you know, like, uh, on everyone's behalf. Then containerizing all of that up into, uh, into Actions now, where, like, yeah, like the containerization, like, is r- really good. The, like, pinning, like most folks aren't pinning it, the, uh, uh, like to a particular-
Dependencies
... SHA, et cetera, you know, like their workflows, and so that's a big pa- that's a big place-
Yeah, yeah
... uh, uh, of, um, of, you know, pain for folks if they're just doing similar to any, you know, dependency management, just V1 or, you know, newest or latest, I think. Um, but uh, uh, that journey from that day to, like, "Okay, we're just gonna run all this arbitrary code, and, like, it'll basically be okay," to now, no, I mean, we have, like, really good containerization. We have a new, um, uh, underlying, uh, ag- agent, uh, containerization, uh, uh, service. It's like thr- we're using it under the hood. It's through Azure. They recently announced it, um, uh, the Azure, like, Dev Compute, but it's, like, very fast, uh, very fast compute to be able to, like, spin up, uh, you know, your own cloud agents, uh, or whatnot. Uh, we're using it under the hood, uh, for some parts of the new, uh-
Microsoft Dev Box?
No, no, no.
Okay.
Uh, Dev Compute. Yeah.
Hmm. Not finding it just yet.
Oh, it's, it's in there somewhere.
All right. Well, we'll cut that out.
Sorry. Uh, but, but with, uh, with, like, Dev Compute, you can, like, run, uh, really, really fast, uh, um, um... Spin up really, uh, small VMs really, really quickly, so you're doing a tool call, just do it-
Yeah, same thing
... like containerized. Exact- exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh, so we're using that, so definitely moving that direction to protect us from every, you know, every, uh, every piece of code that we're ultimately running.
Yeah. I mean, like, look, like, uh, that grows into the, the full SDLC.
Yeah.
You know? Like, um, code hosting was just the start and, you know, and then it's grown, grown beyond that. Um, let's talk about NPM may- maybe.
NPM Security27:36
Sure.
'Cause I think that's also, like, a very major point in the industry. J- like, I, I do think, like, uh, it was looking for a home. It was, like, kind of struggling as a business, right? Like, I don't know, I don't know how you would characterize that, that whole acquisition and, you know, how it-
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, when we were talking, uh, you know, to the team, I think the big thing for the both of us was to find a way to keep NPM, which was basically powering the internet then and way more so now to some degree, you know, uh, uh, running. You know?
Yeah.
Like, keep it going, continue with the scale. It was having, um, scaling problems, if I recall, back at that time. They were doing some rewrites. Uh, it-
That, I mean, that's cute compared to now.
Yeah. Well, that's the thing is, like, you know, when I'm talking to folks now, like, there's, you know, there's so many more underlying uses of NPM than there were, you know, back when we, uh, uh, uh, we had them join, uh, join in with GitHub. But that was ultimately the goal. It was really like, okay, we used to have pages. We have, uh, uh, like, the world's code. Let's make sure that we can keep NPM running well, uh, uh, uh, you know, for the world. And we put a bunch of time and investment into fixing some of the underlying backend, um, uh, changes, some of which we talked about, like some of the manifest work, et cetera. And then now, like, really trying to bring the, um, you know, the security posture of NPM up to speed. But, like, it is a unique challenge in that every move that we make to make it more secure will break a lot of people. Um, and security is paramount, and also, like, we take it very seriously where, like, the, you know, any time that we have a problem with GitHub or we make a change that makes us more secure but hurts, r- there's, like, a snow day for developers or a really bad fire that they have to go put out. And so we've, like, have changed the 2FA policies. You know, we've changed the way the tokens work. When we find tokens that have
been exposed or potentially, uh, exposed, we invalidate them and-
I love that feature in GitHub. Yeah, it's great
... that creates issues, but, like, the, but that's the thing is we're trying to push the community, uh, forward without necessarily, uh, uh, doing something that is going to break the contract that's been for 15 years, you know, or close to it, or, you know, some amount of years, you know, uh, on, uh, uh, on NPM.
Yeah. I think the... So now we're talking about, uh, open source-
Yeah
... and, and publishing.
Mm-hmm.
And I think there's something here with what people are calling slop forks, which, uh, I think Malta from Vercel is doing.
Open Source Trust30:07
Yeah.
Uh, and, uh, part of me thinks, like, well, the way to get past any, like, uh, vulnerabilities, we just, let's just get rid of the concept of NPM.
Hmm.
And we only publish source code.
Hmm.
And anytime you want to import it, you, you have your coding agent look at it and then adapt whatever subset you're gonna use into your, like, vendor it.
Mm-hmm.
But, like, the AI vendor it.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Is that realistic? I don't know. Is it-- Will that solve all our security issues? I don't know.
I mean, I don't think it will solve... Like I-- So Mitchell was just talking, and Mitchell Hashimoto-
Yes
... was just talking about this today, and I think that, like, i- in some ways, it's all, you know, all things, uh, uh, old or new again, you know? Like, yeah, absolutely vendoring everything. Like, you know, I do- I do remember 2013, 2014.
This is pre... Yeah, yeah, let's-- We must return to.
That's what I mean, is like we were vendoring everything. We were having actual discussions around, like-- or at least I remember we were like, "Should we take this full thing? Like, why is this so big? We only need this one file." And so I do think there's something true there, where having, like, m- m-- either taking only what you need or the dependencies just getting incredibly small over time, I think will help to some degree. But it's not gonna solve the fundamental problem, I don't think, because the vulnerabilities, like in an agent looking at them, there's time and time again, there's a million different ways in which we can convince an agent that this thing is, like, secure or not and pull it in, or we can do, you know, uh, static code analysis or, you know, uh, runtime testing to say whether the code works or not. That is, I think, the step that needs to continue to be, like, invested in. The question is just on, like, how much scope. Should it be this enormous project that I'm pulling down, or should it be this piece? Either way, uh, you know, most companies are running some amount of, you know, security checking on the v- on the, um, uh, the packages that they're bringing in or vendoring. That I think won't change. That's like what, you know, advanced security does to some degree, Socket does to some degree. You know, like everyone is
doing a piece of that. Um, how we each do that, like especially when we're talking to enterprise customers, is just like very, very different. No, like there's no one wants one single way to do it. Uh, and I think that's always been GitHub's, uh, unique position in the world. Like, I talk a lot to maintainers. I talk a lot to folks about this. It's we're, we rarely start like a, a, a process and a practice and like push it onto the community. We usually wait for the sort of like RFC process socially or literally, everyone agreeing, and then we'll cement something in.
Yeah.
Because otherwise we're-
That fits your role in the GitHub setting, yeah
... we're GitHub. Yeah. We don't wanna shape the whole thing.
Yeah.
We want it to be figured out. But like how do you balance that, uh, that like sort of, you know, role in the industry to keep everything as secure as is possible and make sure that you're, uh, you know, you're not gonna be compromised as a human, 'cause that's usually how it all happens. Uh, and not, uh, you know, uh, not create a process or lock us into a flow that, you know, you're not gonna like, or like Mitchell's not gonna like, or other open source projects aren't gonna like. That's always been a tricky balance for us, and I think that's something that we haven't talked about enough, you know, is we're not gonna be able to fix everything for everyone in a way that everyone is gonna like.
Yeah.
So tell, help us. Tell us what is working. When Mitchell was talking about, um, uh, the, uh-
Yeah
... upvote, uh, the up-
I was gonna bring, bring out his thing. Yeah
... I forget what it was. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like when he's talking to us, I was ch- chatting with him and talking to him about this, and I put it on Twitter, and we talked, uh, uh, also over DM. I was like, "We're gonna keep working." Like, but I think the important thing is he-- I do actually want to hear what isn't working for you.
Yeah.
Uh, and as... be as specific and clear for your project as is possible. Uh, and to every piece of credit over the many years that we've, you know, known each other through the industry, he's always done that, and I appreciate that-
Yeah
... 'cause there are places that we need to fix up, and we hear from him, and we'll fix up just like we do all other kinds of maintainers. Um, uh, but that like, that process between, you know, making those types of improvements and being more secure and like creating, I forget what he calls it, it's not the, uh, the, the, the proof process, not the claims process. Do you know what I'm talking about? He has that like, uh, he, uh, his projects have a way for you to kinda like, uh, pro-
Vouch
... vouch. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. He has like the vouch system, uh, for, you know, saying, "Hey, you should accept my PRs." That's been-
Yeah, I just built this into GitHub. I don't know.
Well, see, but that's the thing is that you, you say that and like he and his community really likes this, and then I'll go talk to other maintainers and other maintainers, uh, uh, globally, and they're like, "No, this do- this doesn't work for me."
Yeah.
And that is the tension, but also the kind of beauty of GitHub, just depending on which way you look at it, is we wanna help maintainers, so we create all these tools to let you have more control over how much you take in, you know, from AI and PRs. But you can also use this. You know what I mean?
Mm-hmm.
You can go use this project, and if it takes off and becomes the kinda mostly standard, then yeah, we probably wouldn't enforce it, but we would add it in because that's the flow that we tend to do, you know?
Yeah. I hear a lot of people don't know the history of the pull request.
Sure.
And like, you know, like that's how... it's something that GitHub standardized basically.
Yeah. Yeah. It was a, a very messy process- ... you know, like beforehand, and now, uh, you know, the, we have the benefit of it being the process, you know?
Yeah.
Uh, and now we have to go and figure out the next best process or what adaptations change, or what does a pull request look like when 80% of your PRs are just coming from your agents and not-
Yeah
... from other devs, you know?
Do you like the prompt request idea from Peter?
I mean, like I think that for each, uh, like each idea I think has its merits. Like, uh, I'm not, I'm not avoiding saying anything good or bad, but I feel like-
Right
... I've seen a version of, you know, uh, we have that. We have, you know, um, uh, uh, en-entire, you know, To-Thomas', you know, uh, uh, uh, startup. Take all the assets of what you've built and put that in. I think that's got great ideas. Like there's all these various permutations of the PR flow, but I think the reason why there's not a single answer is ultimately we're trying to codify trust. We're trying to say like, "Okay, if Sean reviews this, I'm gonna trust it because you're Sean or you're the senior dev or you're the whatever." And right now, when we are working in a flow where an agent writes code and another agent reviews code, and then Kyle goes and looks at it, the trust is kind of diffuse. Uh, and most of the tools that we're talking about are talking more about verification flows. We have more assets to look at, so I can probably say whether this is a good PR or not, but that still doesn't solve, I think, the human problem of I'm looking at a PR and I wanna know if I can trust it. And we're still-- we still tend to use human signals for that, you know?
Yeah.
Uh, Mitchell approving it or Kyle approving it or whatever.
Yeah.
And so I, I think that's, I think that's why most of these, uh, options haven't really solved it, is because, uh, it's a social problem ultimately. It's a, it's a human problem r-to review it, uh, uh, and agree. Or you fully trust the tool-
Yeah
... and you're imbuing that tool with full trust.
Yeah.
Which I think in some cases that absolutely exists.
And so, so like, you know, in the same way that there will be a tipping point in society when we don't allow humans to drive anymore-
Mm-hmm
... because machines are measurably better than-
Mm-hmm
... than humans. I, I'm looking for that tipping point, right?
Yeah.
Like Mythos is ridiculously expensive.
Mm-hmm.
Someday we'll have Mythos on a desktop, I don't know.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Uh, will, will-- does that change the equation?
Uh, I think it's more like, uh, uh, I took a Waymo here, uh, and I was on my phone and not looking around, uh, at all. Uh, the, like there are other, uh, self-driving, uh, vehicles that I would not trust while like staring at the road. And I think that that trust is something that is-
Is this a Zoox thing? Like what is...
Uh, I think that is both. I think that is both. Uh, you know, like-
There's Zoox in this robo car, uh, taxi. That, that's it. That's-
Well, I mean, depending on what level of self-driving-
Yeah.
... you know. But my point is sort of that I think part of that is, uh, you know, I strongly believe that that's like a mixture of verifiable proof. You know, like how many accidents, how much data, and so on, and the human aspect of how I feel when I'm in this car, what it tells me, et cetera. And so that's why I think some of the like-
Mm-hmm
... uh, some of these, uh, uh, some of our AI tools tend to, um, imbue me with more of that feeling of trust, even if the data says this is 100% accurate. You know, like I feel like it takes more time for us to go, "Should I trust this or not?" And that's in the soft sense of like startups with high agency, weekend projects, and open source. And then there's enterprises and regulated industries and everything else, and that is an even harder problem to go solve because even when it is fully verified, not only do you have to have trust from the humans on the team, you probably have to have trust from multinational, uh, uh-
Oh my God
... multi governments around the world, you know-
Yeah
... and regulating agencies. And so that's where I feel like until we tip over to your point, like on the sort of like human EQ side of it, like I feel okay, like this feels okay.
Mm-hmm.
Like I've been proven enough, uh, then the ball will start to roll a lot faster, uh, where we'll end up getting to the, "Okay, we can trust this and feel good about it in the-
Yeah
... most difficult of cases."
You know, if human trust is the thing that matters, uh, I feel like GitHub as the developer social network could maybe do more there. Like voucher-
Yeah
... is one system-
Mm-hmm
... but like we have star counts, and then we have-
Mm-hmm
... contributor rights, and that's it.
Mm-hmm.
And like, I feel like there should be more in that space. I, I don't know if there's any other design decisions there.
I, I mean, I think that like one of the places that we don't really expose right now in this sort of way is, um, like, uh, some degree of like hard trust and support, which would... Like for me is like sponsors is a good example of that.
Wow.
It like costs you something, you know-
Yeah
... to prove that I, I believe in your project and I like trust you-
Mm
... to some degree, or I wanna support you at the very least.
Okay. Solve payments for open source. Why not?
I mean, like, like I think that, I, I think that like as we keep moving forward, right, there's more and more projects where I, I'm like adding more and more dollars into sponsors personally because I wanna like support them, but I also like know of... You know, I probably never met them in person, but like I know of enough of their work that I wanna support them. I think the thing that I don't love about stars or commit counts or anything else is like ultimately, even with all of the various like abuse and despamming and deduplication work that we do, or anti-abuse, you know, work that we do, these are all like not active social signals. They're passive ones that are ultimately gamifiable. And you may trust me, but another open source maintainer may not. And on what heuristic should you be, uh, trusting me? That, I think, is kind of where some of our thinking is right now. What signal from me is most important to you? You-- if you can define that, potentially like, honestly, like in an agentic workflow, like that's what we see some of these open source projects do, where you have, you know, GitHub actions, and then you have like an agentic workflow that's calling AI, and you're setting these rules. Like if Kyle has submitted and gotten accepted PRs across any given project and has a social handle tied to his account in GitHub, and that social account's
older than a certain amount. Like really complex measures that matter to you, 'cause most open source projects have that heuristic built into their heads, if not written down in the contributing guidelines. You could take that and then go apply that, and then just say, "Oh, we're not gonna accept this PR." Building something that is, I think, malleable to everyone's needs, uh, uh, is a little bit better, rather than going, "Hmm, this account's too young." Because what happens? Uh, the attackers just go and bui- go and create a multitude of accounts, and they wait-
Yeah
... until it ages up. Needs to have a certain amount of stars. That's how star inflation happens. Need to have a certain amount of repos-
Oh my God. Yeah
... with PRs. They all just create repos and submit PRs to each other, and then they, you know, come in and do something nefarious. And so, uh, it's hard. Like it's hard to find the measure. So I think we're, we're looking more at how can we provide you tools so you can kinda choose what's best for you. And of course, we'll give you some standards, but the trust vector, uh, gets down to like- I don't know, some version of like human digital ID like everyone's been talking about. Like how do I prove that it's me-
Give me your eyeballs
... on the internet.
Yeah.
Give me your eyeballs. Exactly.
Uh, th- uh, I, I gotta keep moving on, on, on topics-
Yeah
... but obviously I can go all day on this stuff because- ... I mean, I've been in- involved in GitHub and open source-
Yeah
... my entire, you know, professional career. Um, stars.
Yeah.
Very superficial. Everyone knows it. But I think, you know, time to 100,000 stars is the fastest I've ever seen.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Right? Like, people just reached that in like-
Yeah
... I don't know, months.
Yeah.
Uh, and then like a- at the same time, like I don't trust it, right?
Yeah.
Like how many of these are real or bot or like whatever. Um, I don't know how to ask this, but like what can we do about it? Like, you know-
S-
... is, is stars broken? Is stars fine?
I think that there's kinda two, there's like two pieces. Obviously, like we're constantly like trying to find ways in which like your, uh, uh, users are, you know, producing spam, which would, I would include like be like only doing star gamification. When we find them, we pluck 'em out, you know, and we, uh, uh, uh-
Yeah, but it's like a whack-a-mole.
It's 100% like a whack-a-mole-
There's no way
... now like powered by AI to be helpful. But I, I think m- more so what I'm seeing is, uh, a lot of the s- like fastest time to X, you know, tends to be because we're now inviting so many more people into like software development on GitHub-
Yeah
... that like the zeitgeist is just swarming.
Yeah.
You know? And it's-
It's not just developers anymore
... and it's not you and I.
Yeah.
Like, you know, like however you wanna say like what a developer is, you know, it's not just folks who have been coding for a very long time. It's folks that have maybe started coding or only joined in since the AI era. And now-
And then what's the latest Octoverse number? I, I know 80 million was my last r- m- remember that, like number of developers on GitHub.
Oh, we're over 200 million now.
Yeah, okay. Well, so you see?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like over 200 million developers now.
Yeah, but, but, but it's not developers, right? Like it's, it's people with a GitHub account.
So like, so this is, this is the biggest debate that like I would say like everyone loves to have at GitHub at this point. From my perspective, right, I think that there's, there's clearly a difference between like professional enterprise developer, you know, and then developers. But I think that, I think that the idea that, you know, uh, we should be, uh, like s- I don't know, splitting hairs or segmenting developers in the early era of software development is like not worth our, not worth the time.
Yeah.
So like-
We get into gatekeeping, like what is a developer?
100%, like 100% because I mean, I wasn't a developer when I started writing code.
Yeah.
You know? I was going to-
Oh, no. I, I made-- I like cloned a thing like seven years before I learned to code.
Yeah, yeah.
And then I, and then I wrote about my learning to code journey, and people-
Yeah
... called me a fraud-
Yeah
... 'cause I had a GitHub account.
Yeah.
And I'm like, "Well, no, I just use GitHub, but I don't know-
Yeah
... I didn't know what I was doing."
I mean, I like, I remember that. Like I remember those sets of posts, and like that's like, that's bullshit. So I fight very clearly on the line of like if you create code, if you have an idea and you create it into some way of like, "I'm, I'm gonna run it and use the app right now," you may still use AI in that moment. But that's okay. At some point you're gonna do the next thing. You're gonna create a big-- You're gonna have to learn about this database. You're gonna fix a bug, whatever. Like we're all on some s- same journey, and those people are also hearing about the great new agent skill package or a new CLI tool or a new whatever. And those projects are going up because you want to be a part of this moment, just like I wanted to be a part of the Ruby community when Ruby was popping off when I started becoming a developer. And now I can just click the star button. And so I think that, yes, there's clearly some amount of like, you know, spamming and gam- gamification that we're working against. But I really think we're just seeing this whole new cohort of folks that are moving from technology to technology because they're not working on a 20-year-old software application. They're working on a side app that they built on the weekend for their friends or for their new idea or whatever.
Yeah.
Uh, and that's how you see these enormous charts going up and to the right with-
Yeah
... uh, with stars.
I think something that's remarkable is the persistence or, uh, that like GitHub extends to those folks.
Mm.
Usually, when I see platforms go into a new audience, they usually have to like have like a second platform with a different name that like wraps the main platform.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, but s- somehow GitHub has been able to sort of persist and extend, and it's friendly and whatever, you know? So it's, it's nice.
Yeah. I like, uh, uh, that's partially why I think as we've tried to move into like, um, I don't know, more like low-codey things.
Yeah.
You know, like we so-- we, you know, started working on Spark as like a way to like build an app and run it.
Yes.
I think that the reality is that weee-- anytime we try to like kind of put even a veneer on top of it without like, uh, like when we put a veneer on top of something, we still always show you the code. That's kinda like a tenet. We're never gonna like hide the code from you ever, um, because what, like-
Why would you?
That's, yeah, that's the whole point, you know? Uh, however, I think that what we learned with things like Spark is that really the value of Spark for most devs is like easy runtime. And you may have a runtime or a host that you're gonna use for that, or you can just build something and run it. But like the package of making that like even more simple isn't really needed like for folks that are trying to build software-
Mm-hmm
... uh, and not just trying to build like an app, which is like slightly, uh, slightly different, uh, a slightly different goal.
Mm-hmm.
So I wanna get you in. I wanna get you comfortable. I think the best thing for me as like someone that did not like, you know, traditionally come into software dev way, way, way back, I want anyone to be able to like breach that chasm and not be in the, you know... I don't know. I feel like we're, we're still in an era of like STEM, STEM, STEM. I've got a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old, and it's like we gotta get 'em into STEM, you know, over and over. Uh, and I, uh, I d- like I do, I do the things that good parents do. I was like, "Oh, you wanna do coding? Yes, I wanna do coding." Do coding classes. But now they're just not afraid of doing software.
Yeah.
And that's, I think, the thing that's honestly kept me at GitHub for so long. Anyone should be able to go and build a thing, just like I can go change a light switch in my house. Like I'm not gonna go into the breaker box 'cause I'll probably kill myself, you know? But like- I can go change that light switch. Everyone should be able to go and say, "This fricking app doesn't do what I want. Like, I want it to work like this."
Yeah.
And that, I think, is what's kind of kept us all connected with GitHub through the years and some, you know, and like, during the easiest of times or in the hard times because of that opportunity of like we're the home for all developers, and we want everyone to be able to have that feeling that we've had of, "I had an idea, I created it, and holy shit, like, you know, here it is."
Here it is. Uh, all right. I'm gonna try to do more spicy questions.
Great.
Is it an easy time now or a hard time?
Scaling Walls49:00
Oh, at GitHub?
Yes.
I mean, it's a hard time. Like, I mean, like, it's a hard time and also, like, I was just with my team, and I said, "This is also, like, the best and most exciting time that I think I can remember, like, at GitHub."
Yeah.
Because-
Best of times, worst of times.
Yeah. I mean-
It's never one-
'Cause we've, you know, like, we were talking about Octoverse reports and, like, usually we do an Octoverse report once a year, and we look at the numbers, and we say, "Oh my goodness." Like, I was at Universe in October saying, "This was the fastest year of growth that we've ever had," right? And now we're doing more in a month than we did in a year last year.
Uh, you're talking about PRs.
Commits.
Commits, yeah.
PRs.
Yeah, yeah.
Kinda like you name it, uh, by roughly every measure that we're looking at, there's some amount of sort of growth that is much, much bigger, and that is breaking our system in new ways, not old ways. Like, you know, webhooks were always notoriously, uh, unreliable over the years. You know?
Whose fault is that?
Like, like not anymore mine, but for a period of time, I'm sure you could pull up a tweet that was like, "It was me. I'm sorry." Uh, but like now, like that got rewritten at, at a scale level that is still working and is not having problems today. Now, what we're finding isn't just the like, isn't the, the, the simple stuff that folks are on the, you know, sometimes on Twitter or on the internet are like, "Hey, like why is this like this?" Sure, there's absolutely, you know, silly problems that we shouldn't exist. But now we're talking about like unique, novel permission problems that happen only at a scale across all different objects or whatever, that now we have to go rewrite this underlying system. And so it's, uh, uh, uh, there are problems that, yeah, caught us off guard, which I think I said. I mean, like the growth is astronomical. But also, we're making such material progress in that, um, uh, that I'm excited once we're, you know, once we've kind of like re-, uh, reimagined the underlying foundation layer, uh, or pieces of it at least, what's gonna be possible when it's not just all of us and all the new people that are being developers and all of their agents and all the tools like working together. Um, uh, because that'll still happen in that, you know, uh, in that GitHub, uh, you know, uh, tool, that GitHub community. But it's
a har- it's a hard day anytime we can't give you what you're looking for. We have the same problem internally.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, we operate through github.com. Of course, we have backups when things go down and whatnot for our own operations, you know? But we feel it too. You know? If it's not working, it's not working for us, and that's kind of like the promise of dogfooding for GitHub. It's always been true. We're using the same tool you're using. We're not using a super secret version. We, uh, and so we also need it to be great for us, for our customers, of course, for open source. Uh, and now, you know, uh, uh, o- an exponential growth of agents-
Yeah
... uh, doing it too.
I wanted to load, uh, for, for audio listeners-
Yeah
... who, who maybe haven't seen your tweets, whatever. Uh, so one billion commits in twenty twenty-five. Now, it's two hundred and seventy-five million per week, on pace for fourteen billion this year, uh, if growth remains linear. Uh, is that still the, uh, pace?
Yeah.
Or no, it's been a while.
It's, I mean, it's, uh-
Roughly
... it's speeding, it's still speeding up.
Roughly. It's, it's in April, so yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.
So it's like-
This was in April.
All right. So, so basically you have 14x growth-
Yeah
... right?
Yeah.
Year on, year on year. Uh, and I think that's a scaling issue. I think, uh, I'm gonna like try to really steel man this thing.
Yeah.
Right? People have experienced 14x growth. They haven't had your downtime.
Mm-hmm.
And that's like, c-like can we go dig into that? Dig-
Yeah
... like why? Like what, what's the, what, what broke? Um, what are we doing to fix it? Like, you know, just anything for the community to reassure them.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's a, like I was saying, there's a couple different places that we've seen the, uh, the, the growth issues. Some of the growth issues, uh, which is why we're t- I was talking about, uh, you know, pushing hard on more CPUs as in actions in particular. Uh, more tools, more agents, more PRs mean more builds. More builds mean more CPUs. And so we are expanding through not just our data center, but obviously we were talking about moving to Azure and moving to, like adding an additional cloud compute because we simply need more CPUs. Uh, not, uh, not as much GPUs. Like we definitely need GPUs too, but now CPUs are-
Yeah, it's crazy
... becoming a factor, you know?
Yeah.
Uh, underneath the hood when it comes to, uh, like some of the underlying services, we've been breaking up over the years our database infrastructure, so that way we have, uh, more cognitive separation between our, the various services. The place that we continue to have pain is in, uh, permissioning. And so right now, many of our permissioning layers sit into a database that we like internally call MySQL1, and old Hubbers will know what I'm talking about. And so, like we've been pulling things out of MySQL1 for many, many years. Uh, because like, and we use, you know, we, we use Vitess and we use other technologies to shard, like do like one of each.
Famous thing, PlanetScale was born from this.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
Sam, uh-
Yeah
... you know, old Hubber and friend. I mean, like, and so finding these opportunities to like break this out and then do that globally. The other thing that I think is interesting and, um, uh, like both a unique opportunity and tricky is we also run everything I just talked about in a, like a black box container with GitHub Enterprise Server for people that work on on-prem. So we take everything I just said, and we also do it on-prem, and we also do all of that, and we do it in a data residence setup, uh, for customers that need to have their data in a single location. Each of these has the unique characteristic around how we're sort of storing that data, uh, in MySQL or in a permissioning setup. That's where some of these outages have oc- occurred, where you're seeing it more like across the board rather than just like the one piece-
It's always the database
... isn't quite working.
Yeah.
Exactly. Exactly. And so part of it is that. I think there's been some other places where agents are much more, or more projects appear to be moving towards monorepo. Versus we were going the other direction for many, many years in the industry. Repos were smaller, but there were more of them, and now we're seeing the opposite. Repos are bigger, and there's, uh, not fewer of them per se, 'cause there's new growth, but like, we're just seeing many more big repos. Big repos, uh, big monorepos have always had a, like a unique performance problem, uh- ... like, because each one, uh, is slightly different if, particularly if the underlying blobs are incredibly big-
Mm
... inside the repos. And so we've done a ton of work that you pro- like most people haven't probably experienced, uh, unless you're in this case of the monorepo. Uh, but that Git, uh, uh, infrastructure layer improvement does help the overall, uh, system because, um, many of the improvements that make monorepos work better make all repo infrastructure work better. And so, like, I could kinda keep going, like, down the line, where it's another thing where, you know, we're moving out of, uh, uh... We're changing how we do, um, uh, like, j- I'll just say, like, job queuing for lack of a better, like, explanation, like changing the underlying technologies there.
I, I spent two years being a job queuing guy.
And so, like-
So
... it's kind of a little bit of, like p- a little bit of piece by piece, and it's mostly because as we were, as it was built, we built everything in a way that, uh, uh, assumed, I guess, in some ways that the size of the pipe of work was going to remain the same. There's just gonna be more people coming through each of those pipes. But instead now, in places where a Git push was, uh, generally a certain size, for example, is now, like, no longer true.
Oh, yeah.
You know, or, uh, like-
I push a thousand-
On, on, on the average. A hundred percent
... a thousand line commits, like daily
Same thing with PRs. You know, like PRs, like same thing. Uh, uh, and like we've, like, talked about optimizing that and making changes where, like, and there were, like, technology choices that did not work there, you know. And it got slow, and it didn't, it was not fast. It did not do what the users wanted. And so we've been, like, reeling that all out, you know, and going, "Okay, that's just not right. Let's stop putting, you know, uh, good money after bad and do it the, do it the right way or the right way now." So there's, it's a, it's a lot of things, not quite like, uh, when I've experienced scale at GitHub historically, it's almost always two options that we've used. We go vertical scaling, particularly with databases, right? And we go horizontal scaling. "Oh, we just have more people using this service. Great, we're gonna add more servers," and we rack them in our data center, or we use it in a, a, a cloud. And now, like, we're sort of in a, like, diagonal, where, like, vertical doesn't really work anymore. Horizontal isn't work either because, like, we're all, we all have some CPU or GPU constraints in the world now, and now we have to go and, like, crack open services that have been running for 10 or 15 years and go, "Okay, the rules of this service have, like, legitimately changed, and now we have to rewrite them." None
of this is an excuse. This is like we're, we have to do the work. We have to make it better.
I mean, actually, as an infra guy, I'm like, that, this is, like, one of the most fascinating scaling challenges I've ever seen.
Th- that's like- That's, that's the thing that, that's the thing that it's hard for... Like, when we weren't talking about it publicly, and I was like, I came out and I was like, "Hey, I just wanna explain what's going on," part of it comes from a very old GitHub, like, ethos, which is it's our, it's our uptime.
Yeah.
It's down. W-
Yeah
... what, like-
It-
I know you're a developer, so you're, y- you're inclined to, uh, you know, want to understand more what's going on, but at the same time, like, us going, "Hey, this service didn't, uh, perform the way we expected, and now we have to go change it," we weren't, we're not trying to hide anything from you in that. It's that, well, that's our problem because you expect us to be up, and I think that's, like, really baked into the core, uh, origins of GitHub. And so now what we're trying to do as a team is do all that work and just tell, talk about it more and just share you more technical details, write these blogs, write the posts, get the engineers who built it after they finish the work, just tell you, "Okay, this is what we did." I think that's the contract that we wanna bring back to the community and say, "Hey, we're still very serious about what we're doing. We haven't been telling you about each piece. So let's do that, and we're gonna keep, you know, building this and scaling it in a way to support the, if it's not 14, then it's 30 or it's 50 or whatever the next, you know, uh, exponential growth is gonna be."
Yeah. Um, first of all, fantastic answer. Um, I mean, I, I think-
And I apologize in advance if, like-
Yeah, I was like-
... any of that is, like-
It's a long list
... slightly incorrect, just simply because-
No
... I'm not, uh, you know, uh, the, I'm, like, still in the weeds with this.
Yeah.
But it's not my, uh, day-to-day. But, like, that's the thing is we're all looking at it to that level.
Yeah.
You know?
Uh, you know, and, and, like, obviously, if people wanna help, they can join. Uh-
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, so, like, I, I think the, that is, uh, good. I, I think, uh, people also w- just wanna know, like, when are, when are you through the thick of it, right?
Yeah.
Like, i- is there, have we identified all the issues? Is this just never-ending? Like, is Git broken? Like, do we have to change the Git pro- Git, uh, protocol? Like, w- what, like, how much is breaking, right? Like, this has been a while.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so I think people do wanna know m- what, what's the path back to the, the, the reliability that everyone expects out of GitHub.
Yeah. Yeah, so I mean, like, our, uh, our availability in, m- in recen- like, recent few weeks has been much better than the w- three weeks before that or the three weeks before that and so forth. And so a lot of these improvements are still very much paying off for us.
Yeah.
I think that, um, we're still working on that, you know, uh, uh, that database piece that I mentioned, and that just is a little bit physics, like a little bit of time to get it, uh, to get it fixed up.
Hmm.
Um, because we have to b- the w-
Uh, my, my, my, uh, the, the answer I had in my head-
Yeah
... was call YouTube.
So YouTube ultimately is-
'Cause they also use Vitess.
They also use Vitess. The, but the, uh, uh-
Like whoever was the guy, the scaling guy at YouTube, you know?
Yeah, yeah, like that's, that I believe went to PlanetScale, and it was a part of PlanetScale too.
Okay.
But like-
Oh, you mean Sugo?
Uh, I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, uh, and so like-
He's at Supabase now.
Ah.
There's a whole Postgres drama-
Yeah, yeah, yeah
... thing there, right?
Totally.
Yeah.
So I mean, like some of it's that. I think the other piece of it is, um, uh, our, our move to get additional compute will alleviate a fair amount of this, particularly on the action side, 'cause a lot of the underlying, um, outages is actually related to, uh-
I tell you, actions is the, it's the root of all evil.
I mean, it's all, uh, it's, it, it, it has its- Pros in that it's the core-
Yeah
... it's the core compute layer for either CI, side projects, et cetera.
The main money maker? Like-
Actions?
It's, it's... No, I don't know.
I mean, like, Actions-
I pay a lot for c- for compute, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, Actions is, like, definitely a, a, a, a, a piece of the overall business, but I would say that, like, we ultimately also-
Storage
... give away so many, like, minutes, uh, you know, as part of our entitlements as, as that, that that's why I was saying everyone's using it. We, we talk about it as CI/CD, but the reality is people use it for CI/CD and-
Automation
... various processing and automation, exactly. And so, I mean, like, part of it is also that, like, compute piece that, uh, that is also alleviating some of our availability.
This is my abuse of, uh, Actions. I have been-
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have been scraping for every day, uh, and just like, I just tell people to-
Thank you for your service. Uh...
But this is also how I track, uh, Actions uptime.
Sure.
You know?
Sure.
And yes, anyway, uh.
Uh, so I mean, like, some of it's gonna be that. I would say that, like, each month, I expect, you know, in the next three months, you're gonna see, like, fewer and fewer moments where we have an availability problem-
Yeah
... where things are gonna go down, and that's not just it's stopped. It's that we're still experiencing faster growth than ever before. It's just that those underlying improvements that we've been hard at work on, uh, are finally paying off. It's just that the improvements take-- It's less about, like, these incremental improvements, where you make a small change, and you get this big output. It's now material change-
Yeah
... that takes a bit of time, and then you see a step change in our availability.
There's a thing we used to do at Amazon, I don't know if this is, like, a thing, but, like, if, you know, automated software verification or simulation of load testing and all that. Like, I'm, I'm just like, at this point, you have a whole map of GitHub.
Mm-hmm.
And like, well, you can assume whatever growth rates on whatever dimensions that you care about and just run it through a system, right?
Mm-hmm.
Like, I feel like there's a way to, I don't know, have a systems model of GitHub and, like, see what breaks. But I've-- obviously, I'm pro-- I'm not that close to the problem, so.
Yeah, but I mean, yeah, so yes, totally, and I would say, like, that's been the journey and work that's been happening since, like, I would say November to now.
Yeah.
Because October, right, was the time where we even said, like, "Oh, look at the growth," and like, and then you start to see the chart, like-
It was like, whoa.
... really, really pick up, and it's like, oh, we tested it at, you know, N amount of scale, and now it's at, like, N cubed maybe, you know, like, in some, uh, in some, uh, vectors. And so now we have to go and build it, you know, that way and make sure that it can handle all of that scale.
Uh, let's talk Copilot.
Copilot Era1:03:27
Yeah.
So how many original creators of Copilot are there?
Oh, geez.
'Cause I, I count, like, 12 on LinkedIn.
We, uh, everyone-- Yeah, I mean, like, I forget, like, all joking aside, I forget the number of people that were on, like, the original, like, uh, GitHub Copilot team. Uh, but, uh, there was a bigger group.
I, I heard it's, I think it's Alex, uh, you know, there's Alex-
Yeah, there was-- Alex worked on it. Ugo worked on it
... three people.
Like, there's a, like, a bunch of people that were on that team.
And then their entire management line. Okay. Uh, so, so, like, uh, you know, enormously successful at, at its, in, in its, in its day. I think the last number, I think Mario-
Mm-hmm
... came to my conference, uh, and talked about the $100 million mark.
Mm-hmm.
I think most recently 300. Uh, I might be out of date as well there.
I don't think we shared the dollar amounts.
Okay.
Yeah.
All right, cool. Um, just like what's the state of Copilot? Uh, it's, it's obviously as a concept brought into-
Yeah
... more of Microsoft.
Yeah.
Uh, but just at GitHub.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I think, you know, o-one of, like, one of the challenges is, that we had with Copilot, right, is that we came out the gate with code completion, and it was, you know, super great, powerful, et cetera. And then what we initially worked on after that sort of, like, initial year, year and a half was, um, going after fine-tuning because, you know, our customers, the industry on the whole was really talking about, okay, well, like, how do we get more, um, uh, you know, more correctness or performance out of this? And so we were working on a whole bunch of efforts to do fine-tuning on, uh, larger and larger code completions or, like, next edit suggestions with fine-tuning, et cetera.
And let me clarify.
Yeah.
Uh, is this fine-tuning one model or per customer a fine-tuned model?
Per cust-
Or-
Well, both.
Okay.
But, like, but, like, fine-tuning one model for the overall, like, uh, use and then fine-tuning per customer that wants this as, like, a service effectively.
Yeah.
And around that time is when, uh, you know, the next generation of models came, and that's around the same time that, you know, all these other, you know, AI, uh, coding tools came to be because the models really, really sped up. And so everyone kinda, like, will ask, like, "Well, what happened to GitHub Copilot?" Like, there's all this time, and I would say that we were on an era of going, okay, we wanna improve everyone's results, and so let's focus in on fine-tuning because that'll give us these better results. And then the models got better. And so then ever since, we've been really on this kind of journey to go, okay, of course, we have, like, this great code completion. We've done a ton of investment in the better underlying models that we have, uh, you know, post-trained better, uh, next set of suggestions with post-training, language-specific models, all this stuff that kinda, like, sits in the ether of GitHub Copilot is code completion. But also have now ha-- now have, uh, like, a single underlying, uh, SDK and harness for our, uh, our, uh, coding agent, you know, Copilot ultimately. Uh, the new CLI, the new desktop app, cloud agents that use the same SDK. And so there was this moment of, you know, both, uh, really, really trying to figure out what our customers want, models, uh, Sherlocking us a little bit, then going and saying, "Okay, what does everyone ultimately need?" And
what we think is that it's not solely about the code generation. Uh, it's really about having the ability to use these, um, you know, coding agent brained, uh, uh, harnesses or runtimes across not just the coding experience, where I'm gonna, like, send a bunch of tasks out or I'm gonna use Fleet to, um, uh, to break up a single task or autopilot similar to goal, you know, all this stuff. Uh, but also, how do I do that for all of my security remediation? How do I do that for every GitHub issue that comes in, just stick a coding agent on it just to see if it's possible? Uh, how do you, you know, go through my repository and see all of my documentation and extract out like, okay, this doesn't actually match. Like, that amount of sort of AI coding agent automation, uh, I think is a big part of what we see when we're looking at, okay, we're still kinda going through a similar but very different flow. It's just all happening at the same time. You know, like- There's not really the same like, "I'm gonna create an issue to track my idea of building this." You're probably just gonna go like, "Do it."
Just do it.
You're gonna say, "Hey, just build this," right? And, uh, uh, there are still tons of, uh, open issues and projects, et cetera, that are using, uh, issues like Peter and OpenClaw, you know, uh, to be able to sick all of his agent, um, uh, on that. That kind of infrastructure layer and a really, really great coding experience that allows you to handle the sort of multiplexing, uh, aspect is what we've built, are still building, uh, you know, with GitHub Copilot. Um, and so for folks that, you know, haven't really used GitHub Copilot since the thing that got them excited about this-
Yeah
... you know, which I like, I get, I really encourage you to, like, look at especially the GitHub, uh, Copilot app. Like, that's my new daily driver. Uh, uh, I obviously, like if you prefer the CLI, also the CLI, be able to use all the models, the bring your own key side of it. Like, we're still improving our own models and using those too. Um, and, uh, uh, it's just like a very, very different experience. But I think that broader sense is, uh, of like software development and how coding agents can help throughout, not just writing the code, uh, or even verifying it or deploying it, you know, uh, is, uh, was where we have this unique, uh, uh, angle. The other side is the context piece. Like-
Oh, God
... I mean, like we're still-- It's like one of those things where I think the, you know, the final thing that will let me ultimately, uh, uh, feel complete at GitHub is like when we have this ability for GitHub to act like Kyle wants it to act-
Yeah
... or Shaun or whatever, uh, and we all codify that in rules and c- in, in memory and everything else.
Well, I mean, that's an open research problem, right? Like it's-
100%. 100%.
It's AGI when you put it, yeah.
100%. But like if we can even just do it where my team, without me having to codify everything, and as our methods shift on purpose, you know, to be able to have that full experience and all the understanding of what's happening in my dependencies or open source, uh, that feels like a big place for us to be able to continue to provide something really unique and valuable, uh, with GitHub Copilot.
Yeah. Is there a form factor that we haven't explored? You know, I think like, uh, you know, we did code completion.
Yeah.
Then we did kind of let's broadly call it agentic IDE-
Mm-hmm
... which Cursor-
Yeah, yeah
... uh, famously popularized, and then now it's, now it's all about the sort of agent orchestration-
Mm-hmm
... background agent, whatever-
Mm-hmm
... whatever. Um, and then there's the security review.
Yeah.
I feel like everyone's like, like just throwing agents at everything.
Yeah.
The entire SDLC has-
Sure
... just like covered with agents. Um, are we like at the end of history here, basically? You know, like, uh, you know, is, is, is it just refinements from here on out?
I mean, I think that we're all still in such this like hypermyopic era of AI-
Yeah
... where the reality is that for various like boring security and governance reasons, at least for most people's work, why is my coding agent, even if it's all background agents, background running, not like losing all the context that's available to it across everything that I'm doing outside of coding?
Yeah.
You know? Like I, I think the most interesting thing to me in AI is actual ambient AI, not insert, you know, assistant name thing or like I've tried just about every pin in tool and whatever, and they don't work the way that I'm looking for them to work because they're just trying to capture, and then they are trying to codify and then recall. And I think the thing that I'm looking for is back to the very beginning, I'm looking to be building out the next version of webhooks or like implementing a new feature and it, for it to know every spec doc, every email, the conversations that I've had online, everything about how this could be implemented and be able to like use that as part of its decision making, and none of these tools are ultimately doing this. So I think that it's as if like software development work was a single lane task, was like j- it only needs a developer. Once I, once I write the perfect code, we'll be done here, but that's just never been true. It's all the context of the other team members, what the business is doing, what's popular right now, and I think that's this huge opportunity for us to go much broader than really, really excellent coding agents.
Yeah.
You know? And that is honestly why I think OpenClaw has been so interesting is that sure, it's connecting to all the data, uh, sources that Kyle the human cares about, and now my question's like, okay, how can I take all that and use that every day as a software dev connected together, not just have a new way to kick off a coding agent?
Yeah.
And that's where we're at.
Yeah.
We're saying, "Okay, I'm gonna go use this CLI under the hood or this SDK," but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about I'm having a conversation with you, it downloads the podcast, and it realizes, "Oh, Kyle, it sounds like Kyle needs this app or this thing or this..." That level of-
Yeah, it just recommends it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That level of, that level of connectivity, I think is where we still have a ton of ways to go in software because then when we have that red thread we wanna pull, that idea, it can not only use the perfect way to write that code, but instead all of the sort of taste and judgment calls and, uh, you know, expertise that I've earned or that we've earned as a group-
Yeah
... uh, and use it as part of the actual implementation.
Yeah. Um, you know, the extreme of it is AI runs your life, right? Um, and I think there's a scary inversion of control, uh, in, in the way that I, I literally doing it in the way that developers mean it in terms of frameworks-
Mm-hmm
... like, you know, the, the Hollywood principle, like, "Don't call me, I'll call you."
Yeah.
Um, like there... at some point there is an inversion of control where like y- you should... you stop telling what the AI, the AI what to do.
Mm-hmm.
AI tells you what to do.
Mm-hmm.
And like that's a little bit scary, but also like maybe better.
I mean, like, you know, uh, uh, Nat, uh, I think Nat Friedman shared this in a, a, a, like a Stripe event, you know, like talking about his OpenClaw was like, uh, he connected OpenClaw to his cameras, and it was like watching him.
It redirected his Uber.
I mean, there's a degree of this where I was like, I actually would love OpenClaw to tell me to like drink water.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know that I want it to be-
Yeah
... uh, changing where my car goes. But I do think that's kind of what I'm talking about, which is it needs to have so much more information at its disposal for it to be helpful to me, and I still don't think we're like anywhere near talking about AGI. I'm just talking about every time I have to tell you something I care about that I've ever kind of said or I've said a dozen times, it, it, it should be able to know that, codify that, or gain access to it. Um, like the dreaming ideas like are an attempt to kind of do some version of this, but I think there's a much more proactive angle that, uh, will help software devs if, if we can, you know, test that out a bit more.
Agent OS1:14:22
Yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing about OpenClaw that reminded me-
Yeah
... is Microsoft has a CVP-
Yeah
... dedicated to OpenClaw.
Yeah.
Why?
Because you don't think they should?
I don't, I don't know. I mean, I, I think CVP is a high title.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh, what, uh, why is this so important? Like, you know, Microsoft doesn't-
Yeah
... even own OpenClaw.
Yeah.
Like what's, what's, what's the-
Yeah, I mean, like so, you know, uh, we're talking a lot more about this at, um, Microsoft Build this year too.
Yeah.
I think like the main thing is that what OpenClaw has done is it has made this connection for people to have access to the resources that you have access to and be able to do things for you in a way that previously people were trying to codify into their own agents. And so when you think about it like in the work context, wouldn't it be great to have a Claw-like object that I could actually run on my work device that or had access to my work assets, made-- worked well on Windows, like what that would look like? And so I think that OpenClaw has become the personification of like a valuable agent that understands me because it has access to all of my information, and it can use a computer. Uh, and so thus it can, you know, do a lot more than, uh, just a task-oriented process or like a, you know, a chat tool, et cetera. Uh, and that's like a, a bunch of, you know, the, the goal of Build, right? Like we're at Build this year trying to take a very different approach of, you know, it's unapologetically, you know, aimed at developers. We're trying to show the like bigger investment to not just say, "Hey," like you said, "why do you have a CVP of OpenClaw?" Well, because like one of the problems that we have, right, is that our agents, if you install them not on a Mac Mini
or not on a hosted device, you install them on a, a personal device or a work device, we need better sandboxing at the OS level. I need to be able to use that Claw and not like get fired. And so Microsoft is like, "Okay, great, let's like do that too." And then it's okay, well, where should I be able to talk to this agent? Should each of us just have a Claw available to us at work? Probably.
Yeah.
And so there you go. And, you know, uh, continuing to contribute a ton, uh, to the open source project too. Like Microsoft, I think, uh, as I've gotten more and more, uh, uh, uh, information, like there's so much investment into the open source, uh, projects themselves that for whatever reason just I think there's like this, uh, they don't wanna come off, like those teams don't wanna come off as like taking any credit or getting any recognition.
Mm.
But so many of these, uh, core contributors or teams are full-time just pushing into open source projects.
Yeah.
Uh, and like, uh, I think that's, uh, that kind of shows the difference between like, well, why are we looking so hard at something like Claw? Why are we looking at sandboxing on Windows? Why are we looking at cloud versions of sandboxing? Why are we looking? Because ultimately, like we need more platform components. We don't need everyone to be building the same exact like top-line product. Uh, and so if we're building for builders, that requires us to give you all these components and tell you what they are and how they work and why you should be interested versus only delivering that single vertical like over and over and over again.
Yeah. Um, I, I, I think like my maybe one way of framing it-
Yeah
... is that Microsoft is the original operating systems company.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And here is the new operating system for AI.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I, I think that, uh, we are also in an era where we are-- like we need to help build that bridge, you know?
Yes.
Like all joking aside, like operating systems need to look different than they looked five years ago because it's not just you using them anymore.
Yeah.
You know? Uh, and that's changed the whole idea. It's not, okay, my Claw is gonna create a user account. Doesn't work like that, you know? And so just like, uh, just like all of us, we all have to look much, much more deeply in the stack, all the way down to like the silicon layer in Azure to be like, okay, well, what do we need now? 'Cause the workloads are different. It's not just, okay, we need more inference. It's okay, well, what type of inference do we need? What type of compute do we need to run these agents or run these agentic flows? Uh, it's a really interesting kind of like multi, uh, multilayer problem, uh, versus kind of, uh, I would say, you know, software in the last, you know, five or six years were all going to our events, and we're kind of saying a version of the same thing.
Mm-hmm.
SaaS product has new SaaS thing.
Yes.
It's the best SaaS thing ever.
It was boring for a while.
You know? And so now-
Yeah
... it's like, oh my goodness, like we're at physics.
Yeah, yeah.
You know?
It's great.
We're at physics problems. Uh, and that's exciting.
Yeah. Well, I mean, we're now trying to make like semi con-- uh, room temperature superconductors-
Yeah.
... uh, still.
Yep, yep.
Uh, that's, that's, uh, that's never going away. Uh, no, I think like that, that's a really good overview of like everything. Um, I, I think have I, have we left anything unsaid that you wanted to really get out there that we should cover?
Outro1:19:25
Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, I, I'm really excited by like for folks, you know, checking out, um, checking out the announcements that we, we have at Build. Uh, uh, like go, you know, you can go look at them online and take a look. I think that I'm hoping that it's driving like a degree of curiosity and interest because there's such this big shift that we're making at Microsoft, uh- For developers where if you're a daily driver of like, um, you know, a Mac device or a Linux device and you're like, "Okay, I don't use Windows." I mean, like there's improvements that are being made that I think are gonna surprise folks to just be like, "Oh, that's in-- Like the-- They really wanna do that?" Like not, uh... And I'm talking for developers. I'm not talking for-
Yeah
... I play video games on the weekends on my Windows computer. I'm talking like my daily driver. Uh, like all the way from that to, okay, well, what is it like to build an agent or build an app and deploy it and run it at work in particular? I think that is a big piece of it where I talk all the time, uh, uh, with the team how I build on the weekend should be how I build at work. But if you're working at a Fortune 100 or a Fortune 500, you're probably not vibe coding an app and then shipping it to some service. You gotta go through security and compliance. How can we move just as fast at work? Uh, and that's I think something that, uh, uh, we have a bunch of different offerings for to give you that same sort of agility and power, but in the work context. And then I will tell you, like I've mentioned it a couple times and, uh, it's very freaking cool. Uh, like if you are in the M365 land in any way, check out WorkIQ, check out FoundryIQ. These little like, uh, uh, oversimplifying it, context engines are wild good and like we've given them to our, uh, developers at GitHub, we've given to employees at GitHub as we've used these tools to be able to just ask questions around everything that you have in your work context, and with FoundryIQ be able to
just do the same exact thing across all your existing stores. Like what-- Not, not move to new tools, just connect them in. It's surprisingly powerful and you st- your boss is still not gonna get fired, and IT is not gonna turn it off because it's leaking all this private information.
Yeah.
That is the trick that I think, uh, is sometimes getting lost when we're talking about all these, uh, uh, all these great new platforms because I can use them. I'm like, "Oh, this is super powerful. Oh, and I can't... Like I can't use it." Like and it's-
Yeah
... not because I'm at work at GitHub. It's be-
It's, "I'm not allowed," yeah
... it's 'cause I'm not allowed because they can't do all the things that large complicated companies need. And so, uh, whether it be, like I said, just the kind of interesting daily driver curiosity all the way through to, "Oh my gosh, like I can go use this at work tomorrow potentially," uh, and have that context layer, have that intelligence, uh, it's a huge, it, it's a huge shift. Um, uh, and so, you know, a- check it out. I'd love to hear. I'm like, I'm not shy on social. I'd love to hear feedback-
Yeah
... like what's working, what's not. Um, uh, but hopefully surprise folks a little bit.
What I'm hearing-- I mean, so first of all, I think that's, that's a great pitch. Uh, what I'm hearing actually is that you should put the WorkIQ people next to the Copilot people 'cause like y- the, the exact prob- context problem that you named-
Yeah
... they solve enough for you to do your job, which is nuts.
Y- So like the, the, the thing that we are lit-- Like that's literally what has been-
Okay
... happening the last several months.
Right. I already forecast you were gonna say.
It's like, look, totally-
Yeah
... 'cause like you're totally right. The code, the code and the code asset problem is a little bit unique.
Yeah, yeah.
But otherwise-
That's it. It's context
... yeah, we're all working with each other now.
Yeah, yeah.
It's all just context. Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Uh, great. Uh, I, I'm gonna be there. I'm gonna be doing-
Great
... a couple sessions there.
Yeah.
I'm gonna be interviewing Satya.
I know.
When I, um, uh, first started the pod though, I had like Jeff Dean on. Jeff D- like-
Yeah, yeah
... you know, it's like hall of fame of like-
Sure, sure
... people I wanna meet someday. Satya's on there, so like what should I ask Satya?
I, I mean, I think, I think that the best question to ask is what he thinks is true in like two or three years from now. You know, like it seems like such a throwaway question.
Okay.
But ultimately, uh, the way that, the way that he is looking at this AI problem, in, uh, inference problem, token problem, and what we're a- how we're actually gonna be working, uh, I think you can see some of the recent shifts that have been happening inside of Microsoft to kinda drive us to a place where it's not four, five, six, seven, eight different things. It's not a lack of context everywhere, but like why is this, uh, you know, sort of approach in two years going to, uh, pay off? Because that I think-
Wow. That's a bold... Okay. I'll ask it. I'll say you, I'll say I prompted by you, but-
Absolutely
... uh, it's a bold question because, um, you know, there, I think there's a lot of, uh, doubts to be honest, like, uh-
Of course
... externally. And, and so like, yes, I, I, I want like a straight answer from h- from him on that I think would reassure a lot of people, uh, and honestly like give me a lot of food for writing.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, uh, thank you so much for spending your time.
Of course.
Thank you for doing what you do. I think like y- you know, y- as a CEO, you don't need to be the external face.
Yeah.
But like because you are authoritative, 'cause you, you have so much background with-
Yeah
... GitHub and it's so authentic, like we on the outside feel it, so thank you for that.
Of course. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Sean.


