GitHub CEO: Why Now Is the BEST Time to Be a Developer | Thomas Dohmke

In this episode, Marina Mogilko interviews Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub — the world’s largest platform for developers. He shares why now is the most exciting time to be a developer, how AI is reshaping developers work, how “vibe coding” changes everything, and what skills actually matter in the AI-powered future of work. Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/ Companies & Products: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Marinamogilko.co Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay and Workforce Management.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 1:00Marina Mogilko?

  What would you say to coders who are learning how to code right now? This is Thomas, CEO of GitHub, the world's largest platform for developers with over 100 million users. Under his leadership, GitHub Copilot became the most widely adopted AI coding tool in history. We see big companies put a stop on hiring. In two years, do you think I wouldn't need a developer?

• 1:21Speaker 03

  The idea that AI, without any coding skills, lets you just build a billion-dollar business is mistaken because if that would be the case, everyone would do it.

• 1:29Marina Mogilko?

  He led GitHub's $7.5 billion integration with Microsoft. Now he's shaping the future of coding itself. So you're not scared?

• 1:37Speaker 03

  The dream of software development was always that I can take the idea that I have in my head on a Sunday morning and by the evening I have the app up and running on my phone.

• 1:50Marina Mogilko?

  Thanks to HubSpot for sponsoring this video. Hey guys, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. We're here at Viva Tech in Paris and I have Thomas, the CEO of GitHub. I am so excited to talk to you about what's going on in coding. First of all, let's define "vibe coding", for everyone who's heard this term and they're like, "What's going on? What's happening?"

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's a tough question to start with. I think the looser interpretation from my side is that vibe coding means you open your IDE, you know, like Copilot or Curse of the Insert, any of these, and you go into the agent mode and you give it a task to do. And then you're just following along of what the agent proposes to you and you run the commands. And you're mostly focused on interacting with the agent and not so much of what the code actually is doing. Like you're not reviewing the code all the time.

• 2:41Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, and you don't have to learn how to code. Because I tried GitHub Copilot. I was just chatting with it. I'm like, "Create this website, do this." And then it just tells me where to put the code, so it starts working. So how complicated can the website get with vibe coding? Can I build something that has a database? Or is it just like a landing page or a very simple app?

• 3:03Speaker 03

  My rule of thumb would be you can get as far as you're having the patience to keep prompting. Because you know, as you said, if you don't understand what the agent is actually writing, what the code looks like, well then your only way of modifying, you know, the functionality is by figuring out how to prompt. It almost becomes a quiz or like a game, right? Like where you're trying to, "Okay, so hmm, let me try a different approach." I like to compare this to image models, alright? You start with a simple prompt and you render an image of Paris. And then almost certainly you get something which isn't exactly what you expected. And then you start, you know, rewriting it. And for some time, there were like tricks to do that in Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, by doing things like trending on Artstation. And then you got closer to what you wanted.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  But at some point, you either run into like a direction where you can't keep going anymore, or you just take it and you know, move it into Photoshop or in the world of Copilot into VS Code. And now you have to start learning how to code. So I think you can build a webpage, you can build authentication, you can build, you know, settings pages and things like that. But you're ultimately always going to reach a point where the complexity is so...

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Deep, I guess.

• 4:15Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  You know, that you have to then understand what the code is actually doing. Or you're building something and it doesn't scale. You know, and it's super slow and now figuring out a prompt on how to make it fast. And, you know, let's say it's a Shopify shop and make it scale for Black Friday. That, that is when you have to be a professional developer, at least, you know, for now.

• 4:35Marina Mogilko?

  So, uh, right now, we're using code to do basic things. In two years, do you think I wouldn't need a developer to build a billion dollar company with just vibe coding? Or we're still too far away from it?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  I think you have to be a developer to be in the tech business. Because what you can do with, with just the help of AI, not coding, everybody else can do as well. And it's such a business isn't really differentiated anymore from other businesses, right? Like if I can just prompt it in five minutes and build it myself, what do I need? A SaaS service that I pay a subscription for, right? And so I think the startups will build in ten X, hundred X more complex things that they're doing today with the help of AI. And it's such a differentiating from those that are just vibing it. Now, you know, there's lots of businesses where you don't have to code at all. And, you know, like, like your, your YouTube channel and there's many other YouTube channels where you can build out a brand and then hire a team to do a lot of these things.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  But I, I think the, the idea that AI, without any coding skills, let's just build a billion dollar business is mistaken. Because if, if that would be the case, everyone would do it.

• 5:42Marina Mogilko?

  And then everybody has a billion dollar company, which is...

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Which doesn't work, right?

• 5:45Marina Mogilko?

  Doesn't work that way.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Who's paying the money?

• 5:48Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly. Do you think we're gonna have less or more developers in five years?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I think we are going to have way more developers.

• 5:54Marina Mogilko?

  Way more.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Because it's so much easier to learn it, you know? We talked about our kids earlier. Kids can just get into this by using Copilot and then say, hey, how do I build a game?

• 6:03Marina Mogilko?

  Exactly.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  And they see games, you know, when they, when they go to school, when they talk to their friends, when they, you know, go to a ski lodge and they have a Nintendo corner. And so naturally, kids, when they, uh, you know, explore these, these technologies, they wanna learn it themselves. And so giving them, you know, an agent, a chat tool on the side to say, hey, you know, this is how you can learn coding. This is kind of how you can fix your bug. This can be how you can unblock yourself, right? Like the most frustrating thing when you're learning something is you're stuck somewhere. And then you have nobody at home or in your, in your family or friends that can help you with that because they're all non-technical. So that's when we're saying AI is democratizing access. That's what we mean. Everyone who wants to learn it can learn it. Now, that doesn't mean, you know, everybody who wants to learn coding then becomes a professional

• 6:47Speaker 03

  software developer, right? I think there's a much bigger, going to be much bigger range between consumer developers that build their own micro apps, personalized things, you know, the

• 6:56Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Trip to Paris app to figure out this is the places we want to see. This is all the photos we took. And it's only valuable to you and your family or you and your friends, all the way to the professional developers that builds all these AI systems, all the agents that we see here on the show floor today, that I think is still going to be profession. And there's going to be those, the companies that are the smartest are going to hire more developers because if you're 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x.

• 7:21Marina Mogilko?

  100x. Yeah, it feels like we're moving in with the developing, we're moving into like what websites used to be 10 years ago, when suddenly there are tools like Sua Space and everyone starts having a website. So they need designers who are not too technical, who have taste. So something like this, right? When everyone has an ability to code an app, they will still need someone to like take care of it.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Correct. And you wouldn't start a business today where you're saying, I'm building app, webpages for

• 7:46Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Or for small businesses, right? Like every receiver will tell you that's, that's not differentiated, there, there is no mode, you know, that's, that's not the next billion dollar business. That's why I'm thinking, you know, AI will generate so much bigger ideas that the same size of team can implement, or as you grow your team, you can do even more than those that are just using AI for cost savings.

• 8:05Marina Mogilko?

  It's interesting when we talk about this, when I tell this idea to my followers, like, hey, every team can become a lot bigger, they can do a lot more. They're like, who's gonna buy? We're still gonna have the same amount of people. What do you think about that?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  I think it's temporary, a, a, a temporary effect right now, that this is the natural conclusion for the short term. We keep things stable and we're trying to figure out how the market develops. But very quickly, I think we're going to see people that say, well, wait a second, if I have one more productive developer, why wouldn't I hire another one and another one? You know, AI has already added more work to the backlogs. Right? Like, I haven't seen companies saying, "Well, we're draining all our backlog, and we have almost nothing left." And soon enough, AI is so powerful that all the ideas are eliminated, and we're just sitting around doing nothing. I think the reality is, AI, you know, all these models, all these agents, you know, the path to AGI ultimately means that we have more work to do.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  I said this morning that I believe ninety percent of all code is going to be written by agents.

• 9:04Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  And that sounds like we take away ninety percent of the work from developers, and they're only left with ten percent. But if the total amount of code is growing by ten X, right? Now the agent has nine X, and the developer still has their one X that they had before. And so you can keep going with that logic, and you see that, you know, ultimately, those companies are successful that use AI to accelerate, not to cut costs.

• 9:26Marina Mogilko?

  But at the same time, we see big companies put a stop on hiring, and they say like, "Hey, you need it," to their employees, "you need to figure out how to do this with AI first before we hire someone." What do you think about that?

• 9:38Speaker 03

  I think it's a reflection of, you know, a fast-changing market and a lot of uncertainty, both, you know, in the political environment and in the tech environment of where things are going. And the natural tendency to do is to go slower a little bit. And you might decide, you know, some people are no longer the right folks in my company for that kind of environment, where things are moving incredibly fast, where you're almost forced to use AI to keep up with the competition. Like, the realization, I think, that many companies had in the last few months is that if we have employees that say we don't want to use AI, that ultimately means that we, as a company, are no longer set up for success, because our competitors are all using AI or they're mandating AI. And I think this is the transition phase we're going through.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  But I believe very quickly, we're going to see an acceleration. And you already see, you know, things like Mark Zuckerberg getting the Scale AI team.

• 10:33Marina Mogilko?

  Fifteen billion dollars.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  I think that shows where Mark's head is and where he believes the future is going to be. He's willing to invest into it.

• 10:41Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, yeah. What would you say to coders who are learning how to code right now? What should they focus on to be able to get a job?

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Learn where they are. I think the biggest upside that young people have is that they are adopting new technology much faster than those that are in our day to day. Right, like when you're in a day to day job, you have so much work and you have all your meetings and all the emails and all the things you have to do that you barely have any time to learn while young people that are still in school or in college have a lot of time to learn. And often, you know, young folks are much more open minded to explore these and adopt these new things. It's, you know, when you go to your parents and you're like, oh, you're old because you're listening to all this music from the past or you're still watching linear TV and those kind of things. And I think though, the next generation of developers will grow up with AI.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  They will, in the same way that, you know, the Gen Z has grown up with smartphones. While in my generation, I didn't have a smartphone until I was like twenty, well, I didn't have a cellphone until I was like early twenties and then I didn't have a smartphone until I was already in my thirties. But I think that's, we're going to see a new generation of software developers that for them using a set of agents is just going to be natural.

• 11:52Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  And they're going to have that when they're writing an email, they're going to have that when they're planning a trip, they're going to have that on the trip and of course in their work environment across, you know, the coding skills, but everything else as well in professional life.

• 12:06Marina Mogilko?

  Do you think everyone should try Vip coding today or you think it's too early for everyone?

• 12:11Speaker 03

  I think it's about the right time, you know, there's enough tools and enough AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude that have some form of Vip coding built in, OpenAI launched.

• 12:22Marina Mogilko?

  You have to copy the code, right, and insert?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  Not with, OpenAI has Codex, which, you know, lets you do some of those things within the OpenAI environment or ChatGPT environment. But you're right, there's some tools where you still have to know.

• 12:37Marina Mogilko?

  How to deploy.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  To put it and what a GitHub repository even is or what GitHub is for that matter. And then there's technologies like Russell's, Viziro, Lovable, Bolt, where you can actually just get started without any technical background. What you also see if you follow Reddit threads of people, you know, reporting on their experiences that you will get stuck. That's the nature of this is either you're not asking deep enough or you're giving it

• 13:04Marina Mogilko?

  You just don't know what to ask.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Hard enough problems. Or then you're probably getting it done, but it looks crappy or it's very simple. Or you're going really to the to the edge of the technology and then you're going to get stuck if you don't know how to how to go into the source code and make modifications. But yeah, I think that Manos is the other one, Manos, who is this Chinese startup that brought this agent to market where you can do vibe coding in the sense of a consumer specifies what they want to build and then it builds you this web page or web app right in the chat tool. So you're not, you're not never even launching anything or deploying it or any, any of the developer activities. You're just asking it to build you a tracking for your kids' allowance or, or the trip to Tokyo or,

• 13:49Speaker 03

  you know, those, those kind of personalized apps that are only useful, your, your workout tracker that are only useful for you and where you in the past would have downloaded an app from the app store. And now, and now you're using such an agentic system.

• 14:01Marina Mogilko?

  Interesting. Oh, that's, that's fascinating. Do you think we're going to the world where AI can generate better ideas than us?

• 14:10Speaker 03

  I think AI can help us to generate better ideas because AI is also incredibly powerful for your own reflections, like, you know, putting your notes into, into an AI system like ChatGPT and say, hey, what am I missing or what else could I be thinking about? Or if you take this and combine it with something else, what, what could come out of this? So I think the reasoning capabilities, the chain of thought that, that these AI systems have, combined with your own ideas, with your triggers, you know, with the things that you, you know, that keep you up at night because you're so excited about this. I think those still come from the human, but the AI is going to help us to explore those, to put them into pitch.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll and workforce management. Built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by people-first AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay and Workforce Management.

• 15:20Marina Mogilko?

  That's for the next five years. Let's talk about AGI. Do you think it's gonna be 2030?

• 15:25Speaker 03

  Depends on how you define AGI.

• 15:27Marina Mogilko?

  What's AGI for you?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  I don't know. I think, you know, the arguments are on both sides. On the one side, you could say the models that are powering these AIs today are already more intelligent than what you and I could do.

• 15:41Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Certainly in terms of how much knowledge.

• 15:43Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  They have stored, you know, how they can reason over this knowledge, how they even, you know, can summarize things in such a short amount of time. You couldn't read, you know, a 500-page book and summarize it. So they are more intelligent or more capable.

• 15:58Marina Mogilko?

  And they've also seen all of the ideas.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  But they're not creative. I think emotion plays a big role in creativity, you know, and they have no emotion. Even Mr. Data and Star Trek had no emotion either. And they're not sentient. And I think if you define AGI or ASI as that, I don't know how long it will take because we haven't seen any research of how you can implement emotion within an AI system. And so we're going to be on a journey. You know, Vemo in San Francisco is fascinating what it is.

• 16:30Marina Mogilko?

  Everywhere.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Well, now it's coming to more cities. Self-driving cars, you know, feel like AGIs. I think vibe coding to some degree feels like AGI. But if you define AGI as in it needs to have this human instinct and the human, you know, collaboration and the idea on the morning of doing something completely new. I don't know how far away we are from this. It's certainly not tomorrow.

• 16:54Marina Mogilko?

  Okay. So you're not scared? Or are you? Like?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  I'm excited.

• 16:57Marina Mogilko?

  What's your level of... So you're not scared at all?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  I'm not scared at all. You know, as long as I still need to remind my kids three times to empty the dishwasher. As long as there is no robot that can actually do that, not even a prototype.

• 17:11Marina Mogilko?

  I think it's coming soon still. Like, there are already robots walking in Silicon Valley like the...

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Oh, but like they cannot really take a plate out of the craziness that's the dishwasher.

• 17:20Marina Mogilko?

  I'm seeing the progress, how fast it happens. And I'm not even like, what do you teach your kids? What do you tell them? Like, what are they gonna be when they grow up? What are the skills they need to acquire now?

• 17:29Speaker 03

  You know, I grew up in East Germany before the war fell. And I was 12 years old when Germany got reunited. And I tell them, look, you know, you're growing up in one of the most exciting times that I have, you know, seen in my, in my life. And there's so much technology around you. You can build a company today, not only out of a garage in Silicon Valley. You can build a company out of a garage anywhere in the world. Because all you need is, you know, a good internet connection, a laptop or even a cellphone.

• 17:57Marina Mogilko?

  And a developer, right?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  And a bit of vibe coding. Well, but you can become a developer if you want to. Everybody can now become a developer. They don't have to get access to books and magazines and a computer card that's only in their town or what have you. And so I think from a software developer perspective, it is, it is the most exciting time that developers have lived in because the dream of software development was always that I can take the idea that I have in my head on a Sunday morning and by the evening I have the app in the up and running on my phone, right? And the reality today is I have the idea and then I'm trying to figure out how do I take this problem and convert it into source code and libraries and, you know, how do I make round the corners on, on an iPhone app and, and those things?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  And by, by the time it's night, I haven't done anything. I have basically bootstrap the project, you know, and set up a few things and that was it.

• 18:50Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. So basically, what, what are you teaching your kids? Entrepreneurship?

• 18:55Speaker 03

  I'm teaching them to explore the world. I'm teaching them, you know, to how to solve problems on their own. I'm teaching them or they're teaching themselves how to use AI. And, and I think, you know, be curious and open minded.

• 19:06Marina Mogilko?

  I feel like you're one of the most positive people I interview about AI. There's a lot of people like, I'm not sure, probably 90% of the job are going to be gone, but you're.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  And I'm German.

• 19:16Marina Mogilko?

  And you're German, so it's very, it gives me hope. What would be like the last advice you would give to people who are watching and still have fear that AI is going to take their job?

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Well, I think the best fear, the best way to work around the fear that you have around your job is to adopt the technology, learn about it, learn how to use it, to upskill yourself into whatever the next job is going to be. You know, if you fear that your job is going to be replaced because AI can do it, then the best path out of that is to become the expert in using this AI system. Because there's all, I think there's always going to be a human that orchestrates, that, you know, is the conductor of all these AI agents.

• 19:56Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, so you don't see the future where AI spots a problem, generates a solution.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Look, you know, there's reasons why we do responsible AI, why we do, you know, why we test every model, why there's security guardrails, red teaming, or like, you know, teams trying to hack the model, figuring out what the system prompt is, doing prompt injection. That is certainly things that we need to work on, in the same way that we need to work on software security and traffic safety and every technology that we have in life has risks and rewards. And I think we should focus, focus on the rewards when we want to predict what the future is, and we should work on the risks on our day to day and make sure that the risks don't materialize.

• 20:37Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, so your favorite, what's the top three favorite AI apps?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Well, of course Copilot is my number one as we're working on this.

• 20:45Marina Mogilko?

  You use it internally as well to code the code?

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, everybody at GitHub, not even, not only the coders, everybody's using Copilot. So in product managers, designers, HR, legal, finance, everybody is using GitHub. That's the nature of GitHub, is that everybody is on GitHub and is on Copilot. I really love, you know, ChatGPT for like my day to day, you know, other questions. I have it on my Mac on, you know, Control Space and it just opens the toolbar and I think more and more replacing the typical internet search. And hmm, what's the third AI system? That's my favorite. I have, you know, certain granola, for example, on my app to transcribe calls.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  So that comes to mind. I find that really useful, for example, for interviews. I think it's important to call it out to the person you're talking to, that you're, you know, transcribing the call and having AI write a summary. But it's those things. And then obviously, you know, I'm not very creative in terms of painting. And so having, you know, one of these models create an image for me for PowerPoint presentation, I find that super useful as well.

• 21:54Marina Mogilko?

  That's awesome. Thank you so much for being so positive about the future.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 21:58Marina Mogilko?

  For this conversation. Thank you.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management, built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.