GitHub Just Got Assimilated—CEO Out, Copilot In, Microsoft All Over It

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke just shared that he will step down from his role. The popular development platform will have more than a new CEO soon; it will be part of a new organization at Microsoft.

GitHub will now be part of Microsoft's CoreAI team. The resignation of Dohmke marked the end of GitHub operating as a separate company.

The CoreAI division, announced earlier this year, is led by Jay Parikh, former Vice President and Global Head of Engineering at Meta. One of the division’s key focuses will be expanding GitHub Copilot’s capabilities.

Dohmke shared the following on LinkedIn:

"After nearly four years as CEO, I’m leaving GitHub to become a startup founder again.

With more than 1B repos and forks, 150M+ developers, and Copilot continuing to lead the most thriving market in AI with 20M users and counting, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today. ✨

Thank you to Satya Nadella, Julia Liuson, so many countless people, and most importantly, thank you to all Hubbers for the ride of a lifetime. 🎢❤️"

An internal post sent to GitHub employees, lovingly known as "Hubbers," was later shared publicly by Dohmke.

"My startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again," said the CEO. "GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon."

Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018. The company shared at the time that "GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries."

But plans are always subject to change. GitHub ran independently for almost seven years while owned by Microsoft.

Dohmke will remain at GitHub until the end of 2025 to help with the transition.

AI coding

During his tenure, GitHub grew to have over 1 billion repos and forks. Over 150 million developers now use the platform.

Part of Dohmke's legacy will be GitHub Copilot, which currently has 20 million users. The CEO discussed how GitHub Copilot has evolved "from a simple, but magical autocompletion tool to conversational coding with Copilot Chat & Voice."

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant designed to help developers work faster and more efficiently. The assistant can suggest code, help with pull requests, and review code.

Back in May, Microsoft shared that GitHub Copilot use increased four-fold year-over year.

Microsoft CEO said in April that AI writes "maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of [Microsoft's] repos."

Tech giants, including Microsoft and OpenAI, have focused heavily on improving AI tools for developers. The latest model from OpenAI, GPT-5, is said to be significantly better at coding than its predecessor.

AI coding is a hot topic in the tech industry. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said the company is debating hiring software engineers this year due to advancements in AI coding capabilities.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that AI may "effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer" that writes code for companies.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said that coders are one of the only professions that are safe from being replaced by AI.

Dohmke was interviewed by The Verge's Alex Heath for Decoder earlier this month. In that episode, Dohmke said AI coding is "here to stay" and discussed competition for AI coding tools.

Dohmke could help create some of GitHub's competition when he founds his next startup, though he has not shared details on future plans at this time. He still has over four months at Microsoft, so it may be a while before we find out about his new startup.