Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
GitHub CEO on what AI means for developer salaries, SaaS, and more
28 May 2025
Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, joins Azeem to explore how AI is fundamentally transforming software development. In this episode you'll hear: (01:50) What’s left for developers in the age of AI? (04:54) How GitHub Copilot unlocks flow state (07:09) Three big shifts in how engineers work today (10:47) Is software development art or assembly line? (15:26) Why developers are climbing the abstraction ladder (19:35) Have we already lost control of the code? (23:15) What it’s actually like to work with AI coding agents (39:35) Welcome to the age of ultra-personalized software(45:37) Building the next-generation web Thomas's links:GitHub: https://github.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom/Twitter/X: https://x.com/ashtomAzeem's links:Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azharTwitter/X: https://x.com/azeemOur new show This was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar", a new show that takes place every Friday at 9am PT and 12pm ET. You can tune in through Exponential View on Substack. Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Full Episode
Where we are today in technology means a company like GitHub or Microsoft needs to be as agile as a 10-person startup. And that is quite hard because we're running a big ship at the speed of a really small boat. The nature of the software that companies are going to ask for is also going to change.
We will see a commoditization of software that is so simple that recreating that on the fly will replace those SaaS services.
I think software developers are the first class of career where they start their day thinking, how can I automate away the things I did last week?
But also, they have moved up what I call the abstraction ladder. All of a sudden, with AI, we were able to get so much closer to how we're actually thinking, the language and the descriptions that we're thinking in.
Isn't there a case that we've gone over the hill to a point where we're going to be creating so much code so rapidly that it'll be less inspectable for the human? At least we're already past that point. My guest today is Thomas Domker. He is the CEO of GitHub. GitHub needs no introduction. It is the platform upon which nearly all modern software development happens.
And software development is being revolutionized by artificial intelligence. Now, GitHub is part of Microsoft, and recently Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said about 30% of the code in some Microsoft projects is written by AI. This means that AI writes one line of code for every two lines of human rights.
But that ratio is going to change as AI gets better, and some developers have told me their ratio is closer to four AI to one human code. When it reaches 100 AI lines of code for every one human line of code, Thomas, what is the developer actually going to be doing? Yeah, it's a great question.
I think Satya said between 20 and 30% of the code in our repositories was written by software. So it was a bit broader in how he framed it. I think, you know, the developer will do mostly what engineers actually do and how they define themselves, which is they're solving problems, implementing ideas, you know, they're taking... The big idea you have in the morning, you know, it's Friday, 9 a.m.
here. I'm sure many engineers here in the U.S. look forward to a long weekend, but still have something that they want to get done. And they're trying to figure out how they do that. The work doesn't start with typing in your editor.
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