Universe’s key takeaway: Innovate better with AI-powered workflows on a single, unified platform

I’ve been a developer my entire career and I know what it takes to get the job done.

You have to love to build.
You have to love to experiment.
And you have to think beyond today.

As a leader, I’ve learned that to foster that passion, organizations need to prioritize DevEx, which means keeping you in the flow from idea to production.

So, I made it my mission to help build the best developer tools in the market: an enterprise-ready platform that harnesses AI to increase productivity, embed security, and improve collaboration. An efficient workflow on our platform isn’t just a business asset; it’s a catalyst for developer happiness and, ultimately, solutions to the world’s toughest problems.

Last week at GitHub Universe, we announced the release of several AI-powered features and platform products that’ll improve DevEx throughout the software development lifecycle. We are taking our vision for AI-powered software development across the software development life cycle and making it a reality.

Let’s dive in.

Working together better

Today, teams are spread out across the globe. As such, dev environments need to provide them with the ability to work together easily, no matter where they are. GitHub’s suite of collaboration features, including pull requests, GitHub Issues, GitHub Discussions, and GitHub Codespaces make it easier to do just that.

And our recently released AI-powered features take collaboration to the next level. For example, we integrated GitHub Copilot Chat directly into github.com and mobile, so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and more from anywhere. Combined with the power of GitHub’s advanced code search, we are enabling Copilot Chat to understand and help with the latest changes to popular open source projects, too.

With all these tools working together—as you and your team work together—developers will be able to contribute meaningful value to your organization and your community.

Boosting productivity

Our job is to meet you where you are and when you are—and make your work as productive (and enjoyable) as possible. That means introducing more automation to increase speed and decrease build times, so you can get to the good stuff, like innovation. With GitHub Actions, you can automate your software workflows with world-class CI/CD. While the product can run on your own machine, we’ve seen the ease, flexibility, and scalability of our hosted runners grow more popular for enterprises everywhere.

You asked, we listened, and today we deliver. We’re excited to introduce:

• An extended hosted runner fleet: This includes larger hosted runners that accommodates added machine types. Our new GPU-based machines enable graphic and machine learning workloads, giving you instant access to one of the most in-demand hardware models.
• Hosted runners for dedicated Arm-based hardware, available in 2024: These runners will provide physical access to the latest Arm instruction sets and enable you to build software targeting Arm faster.
• M1 macOS larger hosted runners: With these runners, you can build and test native mobile applications faster. We’ve seen build times come down from 42 to 23 minutes.

Shifting left, AI-style

Security has infamously been a hard nut to crack when it comes to creating developer-centric experiences. We know some of the costliest security exploits in the past year came from leaked secrets. And it’s challenging to prevent these leaks. But with AI, we have the potential to revolutionize how developers build secure applications and radically transform the traditional definition of shift left.

Last week, we started a new era with our enterprise security products harnessing the power of AI:

• Code scanning autofix: Fix issues faster by getting AI-powered code fixes.
• Secret scanning: Seamlessly prevent secret exposure across more than 200 token types on GitHub and create and update custom patterns for your organization. That includes comments, discussions, and other text fields too outside of your code.
• Overview dashboard: Understand your organization’s holistic security posture better than ever before, so you can maintain your customers’ trust.

We also added dependency scanning via Dependabot, which helps secure the open-source community cost-free. Powered by our own advisory database, the AI-boosted feature offers faster alerts and with more context.

Optimizing admin

To exercise an AI-powered workflow at scale, you need to provide the right capabilities for your administrators, starting with easy migration and compliance tools that expand across the organization. To that end, we now offer:

• Migration tooling: Migrate to our developer platform with ease, now generally available for Bitbucket and Azure DevOps. Start experiencing the infinite benefits of the leading AI-powered platform.
• Enterprise accounts: Unlock the full potential of GitHub Enterprise and have a single starting point for your GitHub footprint.
• Enterprise identity: Centrally manage identity and access for enterprise members, including onboarding and offboarding. Now, with SCIM APIs support, this feature accommodates a larger set of identity providers, and is generally available for Ping (to join Okta and Azure Active Directory).
• Enterprise-grade access control: Manage accounts with ease and provide granular access to guest collaborators.
• Account switching: Easily switch between your company and personal accounts.
• Repository rules: Create and manage branch protection across your repos while ensuring compliance at-scale.

Stay tuned for the upcoming release of GitHub Enterprise Server 3.11. This will have features like rulesets, one-click code scanning setup, and new CLI for management, so admins can do their work even faster.

Finally, we know that many organizations are working through governance and compliance concerns with using AI tools. So, we’re implementing policies and features so that administrators can introduce AI tools with peace of mind that they’re meeting compliance and security needs. These features will include IP indemnity, a public code filter, a security vulnerability feature, and content exclusions to prevent files from being used.

To build a brighter future, we need to invest in today

While our peers may be putting AI in their offerings as wrappers, GitHub’s one platform is fundamentally changing the way all of our users build software and innovate.

No matter where you are in your journey, GitHub is the home for all developers: your platform and partner at every second of the development lifecycle. We all want to make an impact and GitHub will help you achieve your goals. Now’s the perfect time to jump in.

Written by

Inbal Shani

@shainbal

I'm the Chief Product Officer at GitHub. Prior to joining GitHub, I was the General Manager of AWS Elastic Containers, where I led the development of containers-based solutions to assist developers in modernizing their application development. I'm committed to empowering developers by creating products and services that enhance developer experience and productivity. I enjoy spending time with my husband, three children, and Havanese puppy, running between swimming, cross-country, and basketball meets.