GitHub’s COO Explains Why AI Hasn’t Replaced Developers

Last year, there were 1 billion commits on GitHub. This year, Kyle Daigle expects that number to exceed 14 billion, a two-component explosion caused by more humans—and their agents—issuing pull requests. In March alone, 17 million pull requests on GitHub were created by agents.

Daigle is the COO of GitHub and Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for developer products. He’s been at GitHub for 13 years, and is paying close attention to how AI is expanding the platform’s user base. Along with agents, legal, sales, and marketing professionals are building apps with the GitHub Copilot app. The line between developer and non-developer is disappearing.

On this episode of AI & I, guest host Mike Taylor sat down with Daigle at Microsoft Build to discuss how GitHub is building infrastructure for an agent-native world: agentic code review, model routers that automatically select the right model for the task, and a philosophy that the most durable advantage in this market is developer choice.

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Timestamps for YouTube:

00:00:52: Introduction

00:03:27: The agentic PR flood

00:04:33: GitHub's approach to helping open-source maintainers manage the surge

00:06:15: What 14 billion commits means for code quality

00:08:03: Moving from per-seat licensing to usage-based pricing

00:09:45: Kyle's dual role as GitHub COO and Microsoft's chief marketing officer for developers

00:13:03: Developer choice as competitive moat

00:14:57: How to balance dogfooding your own tools with staying honest about the competition

00:19:45: Hill climbing, frontier tuning, and solving the model-routing problem

00:24:45: Kyle's agentic communication hack

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Kyle Daigle on X: https://x.com/kdaigle

Mike Taylor on Every: https://every.to/@mike_2114

Mike’s piece on building an AI version of Kyle Daigle: https://every.to/also-true-for-humans/i-interviewed-an-ai-version-of-github-s-coo-then-spoke-to-the-real-one

GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot