Auf Wiedersehen, GitHub ♥️

Over a decade ago, my family and I made the leap to move from Germany to the United States after the sale of my startup to Microsoft. In the years since, I’ve had the privilege of working with many exceptional human beings, including Hubbers, Microsofties, customers, partners, our GitHub Stars, open-source maintainers, and developers around the world who’ve helped us shape GitHub. From building mobile developer tools, to running the acquisition of GitHub alongside Nat Friedman, to becoming GitHub’s CEO and guiding us into the age of Copilot and AI, it has been the ride of a lifetime.

Still, after all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again. GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon. I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world.

With more than 1B repos and forks, and over 150 million developers, GitHub has never been stronger than it is today. We have seen more open-source projects with more contributions every year. AI projects have doubled in the last year alone. And our presence in companies of any size is unmatched in the market. The GitHub platform has continued to lead with incredible momentum. We massively improved accessibility and availability, brought GitHub to the EU, Australia, and back to the US for FedRAMP certification, and fixed a ton of small and not-so-small papercuts. GitHub Advanced Security transformed the industry toward “found means fixed” with the power of AI, reducing mean time to remediation by 60% and enabling teams to fix vulnerabilities 3x faster. GitHub Actions has firmly matured into the world’s leading CI solution, now powering 3 billion minutes per month — up 64% year-over-year — fueled by many key ships and stability improvements.

And of course, together, we launched and scaled Copilot from a simple, but magical autocompletion tool to conversational coding with Copilot Chat & Voice, to reviewing and fixing code, to full-stack app creation with GitHub Spark. Today, GitHub Copilot is the leader of the most successful and thriving market in the age of AI, with over 20 million users and counting. We did this by innovating ahead of the curve and showing grit and determination when challenged by the disruptors in our space. In just the last year, GitHub Copilot became the first multi-model solution at Microsoft, in partnership with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. We enabled Copilot Free for millions and introduced the synchronous agent mode in VS Code as well as the asynchronous coding agent native to GitHub. 

Because of your relentless work, GitHub Copilot has introduced the greatest change to software development since the advent of the personal computer.

While I’m certainly proud of our hard-earned business growth, technology built for its own sake means nothing but vanity unless it serves a greater purpose. We only succeed when the world succeeds, too. By launching this new age of developer AI, we’ve made it possible for anyone — no matter what language they speak at home or how fluent they are in programming — to take their spark of creativity and transform it into something real. I am more convinced than ever that the world will soon see one billion developers enabled by billions of AI agents, each imprinting human ingenuity into a new gold rush of software. When that day comes, we’ll know where the path began: with GitHub. 

Thank you, Hubbers. Being your colleague and your leader has been a great honor and I will cherish our many beautiful moments. Together, we’ve bent the arc of technology for the better.

So long, and thanks for all the fish,

Thomas

Written by

Thomas Dohmke

@ashtom

Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools to accelerate developer happiness. Currently, Thomas is the Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he has overseen the rise of the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tools – including the launches of GitHub Copilot, Copilot Workspace, and GitHub Models. Thomas is a celebrated TED speaker and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.