GitHub's plan for Agents — Kyle Daigle, GitHub
GitHub's plan for Agents — Kyle Daigle, GitHub
GitHub's plan for Agents — Kyle Daigle, GitHub
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Shownote
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I’m excited to work with Microsoft once again as the presenting sponsors of the
AI Engineer World’s Fair [https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2026]! We’ll
streaming live from MS Build [https://build.microsoft.com/] today for a special
crossover pod with our friends at No Priors
[https://x.com/saranormous/status/2061681787169017949?s=20] and the one and only
Satya Nadella. However we did not hold back with this interview - we asked all
the burning questions about uptime and Copilot that we know you have in your
minds. Lets go!
For almost two decades, GitHub has been the home of software, where both open
source and closed flow, through commits, pull requests, reviews, actions, etc.
This ecosystem flourished as open-source maintainers and contributors would
continue shipping code for the benefit of the community. However as coding
agents began to ship mass quantities of code - growing 1400% in 2026, it marked
a new era that was both extremely exciting and challenging for GitHub.
While these agents help more people ship more projects, they also significantly
increase the floor of how much code is shipped, how often it is shipped, how
many people commit code, and basically orders of magnitude multiples in every
dimension of GitHub infrastructure:
Now GitHub inevitably experiences more pressure on their infrastructure which
was originally designed around human developers moving at human speed. This has
resulted in a very publicly notable uptime story:
So it begs the question of whether current systems around code can absorb what
AI produces. Can CI/CD keep up when every idea becomes a build? Can open source
maintainers survive floods of AI-generated slop contributions? Can GitHub
preserve the human social contract of software while becoming the operating
layer for agents?
Which brings us to the perfect person to answer these questions: GitHub COO Kyle
Daigle. In this episode, he joins swyx to unpack what happens when AI doesn’t
just autocomplete code, but starts changing how companies operate, how open
source works, how pull requests get reviewed, and how GitHub itself has to
scale.
We go deep on GitHub’s internal AI workflows: micro-skills, WorkIQ, MCP, Slack,
Teams, email, Copilot workflows, the new Copilot desktop app, CLI, cloud agents,
and how Kyle uses agents to look backwards across company context before
deciding what to do next. Kyle also reflects on GitHub’s history building
webhooks, APIs, Actions, npm, Dependabot, and Semmle, why the AI era is breaking
GitHub in new ways, how Actions became a general-purpose compute layer, and what
Copilot becomes after code completion.
Full Video Pod
We discuss:
* Kyle’s expanded role across GitHub
* How AI got Kyle coding again after years in leadership
* Why GitHub rolls out AI through existing workflows instead of forcing new
tools
* WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, email, and GitHub as company context
* Why massive “mega-skills” are giving way to small, atomic micro-skills
* How AI changes summarization, communications, marketing, and analyst work
* Why former developers in leadership may have a unique advantage in the AI era
* Kyle’s “15 agents on Saturday” workflow
* How Kyle built an AI-generated executive presentation for CRO/CFO teams
* Why AI changes the chief of staff role without removing the human work
* GitHub Actions, webhooks, arbitrary code execution, and secure agent compute
* The npm acquisition, supply-chain security, 2FA, and token invalidation
* Slop forks, vendoring, and whether AI agents change dependency management
* What pull requests become when most PRs come from agents
* Prompt requests, vouching, AI review, and trust in open source
* What counts as a “developer” when AI lowers the barrier to building
* GitHub Spark, low-code, and why GitHub refuses to hide the code
* 14x commit growth, Actions load, databases, monorepos, and availability
* Copilot’s evolution from completion to CLI, desktop app, cloud agents, and SDK
* Context, memory, rules, and making GitHub “act like Kyle wants it to act”
* Ambient AI, OpenClaw, enterprise security, and the new operating system for
agents
* What swyx should ask Satya Nadella about Microsoft’s AI future
Kyle Daigle
* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyledaigle
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyledaigle]
* X: https://x.com/kdaigle [https://x.com/kdaigle]
Timestamps
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:36 Why AI Got Kyle Coding Again
00:07:04 Running GitHub with AI: WorkIQ, MCP, Slack, Teams, and Skills
00:15:39 The Golden Age for Former Developers in Leadership
00:17:31 15 Agents on Saturday and AI-Generated Executive Work
00:20:20 How AI Changes the Chief of Staff Role
00:21:45 GitHub’s History: Actions, npm, Webhooks, and Open Source
00:28:45 Slop Forks, Vendoring, and AI Dependency Management
00:33:57 Pull Requests, Prompt Requests, and Trust in Agent-Generated Code
00:41:21 GitHub Stars, 200M+ Developers, and the New AI Builder Wave
00:45:15 GitHub Spark, Low-Code, and Why GitHub Still Shows the Code
00:47:38 GitHub’s Hardest Era: 14x Growth, Reliability, and Scale
00:59:21 Actions as the Compute Layer for CI/CD and Automation
01:02:04 The State and Future of GitHub Copilot
01:08:24 Ambient AI, Background Agents, and the Future of the SDLC
01:13:09 OpenClaw, Enterprise Security, and the New OS for Agents
01:18:03 Build Announcements, WorkIQ, FoundryIQ, and Microsoft Context
01:21:41 What Should swyx Ask Satya?
Transcript
Introduction: Kyle Daigle’s Expanded Role at GitHub and Microsoft
Swyx [00:00:00]: We’re here with Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub. Welcome.
Kyle [00:00:07]: Hey, thanks for having me.
Swyx [00:00:08]: You’re not just CEO of GitHub. People know you as that. You
have a new role.
Kyle [00:00:11]: So I have an expanded role now. I’ve been working at GitHub for
thirteen years and doing all things developer. Joined as a developer myself. And
now, I’m also responsible as the CMO of Developer for Microsoft. And so all the
kind of learnings and passion for developers and how we work with them and how
we communicate and how we bring our products to market, we’re also bringing that
expertise to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and helping every developer that
uses a Microsoft product or would like to have a sort of similar experience that
they’ve had with GitHub over the years. So it’s a different role in some ways,
but it’s also just building on the experience that I’ve had at GitHub of just
sort of tell the truth, be authentic, show people how to use it and then let the
products speak for themselves. Now just doing that with, all of Microsoft.
Swyx [00:01:09]: We’ll be releasing this in conjunction with Build. You got lots
of stuff planned, and we can sort of touch on that whenever it’s appropriate. I
think one of the interesting things is I rarely meet a COO who’s also a CMO. I
think you’re a very outward facing and you’re very confident publicly. That’s
rare. Do you actually view yourself as COO? What’s What is your thing?
From GitHub Developer to COO/CMO: Building the Platform and Operating GitHub
Kyle [00:01:33]: I think for me, it’s been funny. The titles have always been,
a— have always felt a little strange to me. I joined GitHub as a developer? I
wrote so much of the
Swyx [00:01:46]: Let’s bring that up. You wrote the back ends?
Kyle [00:01:48]: I was going through, I was going through, some old photos, when
folks were talking about how things were being built or how there was a build
GitHub. I built, webhooks and worked with teams building the API, built the
platform layer. Anything that integrated with GitHub, up until really twenty
eighteen, I built or ran the engineering teams. And that’s kind of where my the
beginning of my passion always was helping people build things, deliver them to,
their customers. And so being a developer, building for developers was always
super unique. In a— I think as my role expanded, it became my ability to talk to
not just developers, but also enterprise customers or business leaders and have
this translation layer. And then through all those years, GitHub has always
operated pretty uniquely. Post-pandemic, working remotely was not as novel as it
was when GitHub started in two thousand and eight. But all that expertise of
running remote teams, doing it well, became this sort of bigger role, ultimately
turning into the COO role of how do we operate GitHub in the way that GitHub’s
always operated after the Microsoft acquisition. And kind of so on from there.
So like for me, I think the— I’ve, I still code. I love coding but the problem
has always been, people. It’s a much harder problem to both support our own
employees, a harder problem to communicate to developers and enterprise buyers
what we’re building why it matters, ‘cause those are two very different
messages. And so getting to work in the mix of COO, CMO, also just being a dev,
I think is what’s kept me at GitHub for so long.
AI Workflows for Leadership: Commits, Retrospectives, and Context
Swyx [00:03:40]: Apparently, you have— your commits have gone up. What’s this?
What’s going on?
Kyle [00:03:45]: Rui’s called me out pretty aggressively. So I think— as you can
imagine, right, you can see my normal era of being a dev In the twenty thirteen,
twenty fourteen era, and then moving into management, and then ultimately the
COO role. I think what you see there is me, really getting back to coding thanks
to AI. I— similar to, attaching problems between how to market and how to
operate a business and how to code, I find, building agents and workflows that
are connecting very disparate problems to be what’s driving this. So that’s,
some of it’s writing software. A lot of it is, connecting a ton of a different
data sources to, help me out. But that is completely me really diving in on the
AI side in trying out our tools, trying out everyone’s tools, But building for
me, building for the non-technical leader, though I’m technical and how we’re,
able to use these tools more than just the simple, call and response that I
think a lot of the non-technical, your employers, you have to get— you have to
use AI, and so everyone uses, ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whatever. To
really get into, how is this going to help me out, it— I find that it’s not the
I need to write a blog post, I need to those simple examples. Helping people
find the workflows of, “Okay, I need you to go through all the PRs today. I need
you to go through everything that we’ve posted online. I need you to go through
what we did the last three months. Go through all of my Obsidian notes for any
mentions of this then go through my transcripts at work.” We use, Teams, so,
using WorkIQ, go call that MCP server, grab all the transcripts, go through all
the Slack, and then build me out the plan of, what this week’s messaging
actually was. That’s something that was, impossible because for me, I find AI in
a what most of this launch here is actually, less building forward. It’s
actually, a recursive loop backwards. I’m always looking at what had happened
first. Go back through the week and tell me what we did, what worked, what
didn’t work? And then tell me in the next three or four days-What would you
tweak based on this sort of like looking backwards and then looking ahead a
little bit? I find that to be so much more valuable, especially for like
non-technical, because that retrospection is actually LLMs are very good at
that. Like finding all the patterns, pulling them out, and then applying that
retrospection to just a couple of days or just like a short period of time. Is
all a bunch of apps that I’ve built and launched a bunch of, internal tools. I
use the new, GitHub Copilot app, the desktop app with workflows. Every time I
crack open my laptop, it’s running workflows for me. It’s just a ton of
different stuff and of course, it all ends up on, it all ends up on GitHub.
Swyx [00:06:47]: Of course. That’s where, that’s where, stuff is hosted. Man,
there’s so much to ask you. I was going to leave the how do you run a company
with AI thing at the end. I have to ask one— double click one thing. You said,
you are looking back at the week. You’re, you’re understanding what happens.
When you say we That’s three thousand people. How?
Rolling Out AI Internally: Skills, CLIs, and Company Context
Kyle [00:07:09]: I think when we started rolling out AI internally beyond
engineering, right? One of the things that I was really, passionate about is
like we have to do this in a way where no one has to change how they work. I
don’t want to have to teach you a tool. I don’t want to have to teach you
something new. And so for us, we tried out a few tools. Most of them don’t work
because I got to get you on board? I got to teach you how to use it. What we’ve
actually ended up doing is we’ve built like a set of skills internally. We have
we each have our set of skills, and we’ve just been distributing even to the
non-technical folks, the CLI. And then effectively, we’re just giving it access
to like read about everything that we’re writing. So that’s for us, that’s
usually GitHub, Teams, Email, and Slack. So Teams for, video chat, generally
speaking.
Swyx [00:08:03]: Teams and Slack?
Kyle [00:08:04]: so we use Teams for video communication, but we don’t use it
for chat. W-we— GitHub for a long history, right? We’re always
Swyx [00:08:13]: Also Slack
Kyle [00:08:14]: Talking about ChatOps and like everything is built into Slack.
Like every command, every flow.
Swyx [00:08:18]: So even though you have been acquired for I don’t know, eight
years now
Kyle [00:08:22]: we still
Swyx [00:08:23]: You still use Slack?
Kyle [00:08:23]: it’s a purpose-built tool for us, and I think the reality is
that moving off of it would be so bluntly expensive? Simply because all the
tooling is, baked in with that paradigm. And they both have their pros and cons
but they don’t work the same way at all. We still use a bunch of different tools
Because it’s the purpose-built tools that We need. And then
Swyx [00:08:47]: Well, the same doesn’t go for the rest of Microsoft,
presumably.
Kyle [00:08:50]: like the like various teams like operate
Swyx [00:08:53]: They make their own decisions
Kyle [00:08:54]: Various ways. I think it just matters what you’re trying to
what you’re trying to do. But we do we do work across kind of every tool that we
use, and then by giving everyone access to all of that context and the new
WorkIQ MCP server, which is quite cool if you do live in the M365 like world. I
can ask it all these backwards-facing questions, and it’s incredibly important
for our teams that are working remotely. There’s a lot of stuff you miss when
you’re not in an office, and we are spread out all over the world. So most of
that is looking back. And then we post, we post either auto-automatically into
GitHub issues or discussions, these sorts of like findings or like our industry
reports. Like what’s happening this morning, today, yesterday. A little
automation gets run. We’ll use the app. We might use GitHub Actions like with,
our agentic workflows just to go do that run, and then we push it into GitHub,
and w-we keep having a conversation. So usually for us, it’s about that sort of
like looking back, looking forward on the non-technical side. And then of course
for a lot of those folks, it’s also building an app, pushing it to GitHub pages
or pushing it somewhere to host it et cetera. But it’s just like enabling
everyone with that power of it’s going to take me a week to figure this out.
Instead, we’re going “Okay I built a skill. Let’s put it into a repo. We’ll all
share that skill together, and then we’ll use the CLI or now the app-” “just to
run it.”
Micro Skills vs. Mega Skills: How GitHub Uses AI at Work
Swyx [00:10:26]: All right. I think, I think we’re going straight into like the
team management and productivity thing. I think a lot of people are getting
various levels of LLM psychosis. How do you manage the bloat of skills? Like
everyone Has their thing, and they’re Like trying to promote it to the rest of
their peers in their org, right? And obviously, whoever becomes a skill
influencer internally becomes like an AI leader, right? Of sorts. I assume you
have those.
Kyle [00:10:50]: like I think we have
Swyx [00:10:52]: And I assume it’s a mess a Yeah.
Kyle [00:10:54]: there’s like I— like I think the reality is there’s two pieces.
Like first is I think that we’re ending the era of these like massive,
beautiful, perfect skills that are just like not any of those things. ‘cause for
a while, right every tweet every day is like go download the skills, the
perfectly managed thing to do this entire workflow. And I think that like what
we’ve found and what— I was just with my team, this week, and we were talking
about the skill side, and we’re really talking about these like incredibly micro
skills that are just doing one thing for us very well Versus a skill that’s
going to do I said, that full report. That doesn’t really exist on our side
anymore. It’s usually how do— like a single skill that’s going to identify the
most important marketing information given any MCP server. Like this is the most
important thing. Less about stitch a bunch of tools together and have it produce
this mega output because then weeks go by, months go by, things change, and you
want to tweak
Swyx [00:11:58]: It’s brittle
Kyle [00:11:58]: Your mega skill and you’re screwed? You can’t do that. And so
now we’re really just talking about the Legos we’re using and just letting the
instruction book be something we’re all putting together. Whereas I think a lot
of AI skills for a while have been that mega instruction book style.
Swyx [00:12:15]: I’ve, thought a lot about Postel’s law. I don’t know if that’s
a term that is, means things to folks. It’s the idea that you should be liberal
in what you accept and strict in what you output, right? And I think that’s like
a good framing principle for skills. This is my skills, obviously on GitHub. I
feel like everyone should have like how like some repos In GitHub are special
repos? I feel like we should sort of reify the slash skills and everyone like
give it some kind of special presentation. Anyway, so, yeah, this is one of
those like download Download anything, transcribe anything, and then you can
string together the atomic skills that do one thing well Into like some kind of
orchestration skill that calls other skills. I assume, does that match?
Kyle [00:12:56]: I like I think so. I think that the
Swyx [00:13:00]: Summarize anything.
Kyle [00:13:01]: Like I think the- For me, summarizing something for I do
communications and PR and analyst relations and marketing and customer
activities, and so my summarize everything is very different for each one of
those like Contexts. What ‘Cause if I’m summarizing something for an analyst,
that’s a very different thing than, probably how I’m going to summarize
something for like a customer meeting or an engagement. So that’s I think like
the difference when we’re talking about the like the tools I might use on
Saturday or the skills I might use on a Saturday when it’s just for Kyle. Yeah,
those are kind of like they have an atomic actual tool underneath or maybe
skill, and then Kyle cares about X. But I think when we’re talking about work
and enabling the the marketers, communicators there, it’s the atomic, this is
what good summarization is, and then this is what I care about as for marketing
for communications For whatever. And that I think is like the interesting matrix
problem when we go from like a developer set of concerns to all kinds of
different professions, is that what that word means to me is different than it
means to you is different than it means to the analyst or the salesperson, and
that’s where I think the matrix mess is that we’re starting to like still
starting to find. It’s about these mega skills but they’re all just slight
permutations, but those permutations are really important. It’s the difference
between someone reading this and going “Did AI make this?” what Or “This makes
total sense, and I would expect this when I’m giving a briefing to Gartner,” or
like whatever else.
Swyx [00:14:37]: I think the beauty of it maybe is that you don’t have to be
that careful about what goes in there. It doesn’t have to exactly fit as long as
it like roughly is contained in there. I used to complain about plugin hell,
basically. Like when you have a framework and then you have a hundred things
that you need to integrate, everyone does like the GitHub used to be bloated
full of these things. And now we don’t need them anymore ‘cause now you just use
skills.
Former Developers in Leadership: AI as a Creation Multiplier
Kyle [00:15:00]: And like I think the most magical thing is the just that like I
can just also crack it open. Like Like yes, I could go like change the how the
plugin is coded, or like I could go do that now with AI, but I think there’s
just something more magical about getting a response back and being “That’s not
right,” and then you just crack the skill open, you just type English words and
it’s different. That building block is just, I think very unique. Once I get
everyone to kind of understand how to best how to best make those changes to get
the most power out of them.
Swyx [00:15:36]: Is there a— you have a your peer group that Of people like you.
Is there a common framing for Something I’m feeling is, which is true, is that
is this a golden age for former developers who are now in leadership? Because
you can wield the tools, you would know the right words, you’re maybe not too
close to the details. Doesn’t matter. But like you’re more effective than
someone who doesn’t come from that background.
Kyle [00:15:59]: I think that like the secret has always been your ability to
identify patterns and solve problems, and I think that for folks that like
myself that don’t code day to day anymore, that has made me successful as a
developer, made me successful as a COO and now CMO. And so now that I have
access to get and write code, I’m now applying that sort of like pattern finding
and problem solving, and I know enough still about how to then go and say, “Oh,
I want to make an app, but I don’t want to break into jail or create something
that’s not going to be able to work or to be deployed scale or whatever.” that
ability to apply all that additional business knowledge and still code I think
is what makes that so interesting to me. Slightly different than I think some of
the other like technical leaders that became business leaders and now are going
back to their apps and updating them. Good for them? But I think the more, much
more interesting thing is, well, now I have this whole new set of expertise over
ten plus years. Why not take that and use that as a developer with these AI
tools? So I definitely think that makes me more powerful, but I think that’s
true for like every dev as well. Most of the dev friends I still have also have
some other underlying skill and passion. There’s really talented, very kind of
linear computer science software devs, absolutely. I just find that the folks
that came from a different career, went to school for something else, went off
and did this random thing, and then became a software dev, or were a dev, did a
random thing, came back. Learning that extra set of information, learning those
extra skills, and now having the power of an AI where I can crank up fifteen
agents on Saturday while my kids are doing lacrosse, That’s like really
powerful. And I think it gets me back to that feeling of like creation, and it’s
very hard to replicate that in most other senses? That first time you build an
app and you click it and you show someone that’s magical. And so being able to
do that not just in code, but across all kinds of different assets that’s,
that’s huge. We were doing we’re doing our every year we do our revenue
planning. We talk about okay, what is it going to look like for next year? And
of course as you imagine, there’s, slideshows everywhere talking about what are
we going to talk about, what’s the narrative, et cetera. And so as you said I’m
“Okay, well, I could probably just like build something to build this and then
that way I don’t have to go build the whole spreadsheet or I have to pass it to
my team.” So we went through this process, and I got all the information and
used the skills I mentioned. I built like a little app just to make it so I
could look at some of the information in a SQLite database, more easily. And I
ultimately built this entire presentation without touching any of it and I was
“Okay, I’m just going to present this to our CRO, the CFO, their teams,” without
mentioning I’d built it with AI. I like built a skill to make it look very much
not AI driven. Just not pretty.
AI-Generated Presentations, Human Taste, and the Changing Chief of Staff Role
Swyx [00:19:03]: Like a design. Yeah.
Kyle [00:19:03]: Not pretty. But just like very clearly not AI. Kind of like
don’t do anything interesting.
Swyx [00:19:08]: That’s, yeah, that is valuable.
Kyle [00:19:08]: Just go Exactly. We did the whole thing through. It used my
notes from Obsidian, it used all the context I mentioned before, the plans, and
Never came up once that it was AI generated.
Swyx [00:19:20]: It didn’t matter.
Kyle [00:19:20]: Never once. D It didn’t matter. And so now I take
Swyx [00:19:23]: This is a tool
Kyle [00:19:23]: I can take that tool and go, “Look, I don’t want you to go
build slideshows.” They’re just helping us share information with each other. If
this thing can do it With a little bit of crafting from you and then we can look
at it together, awesome. There’s no value in all that extra work. I think that
the ability to, make it look humanly bad and and build a little app to,
manipulate the data I think is part of, that upside for devs that are now in
leadership roles. Because, the thing that I feel like I said before, this that’s
all a people, that’s all a people problem. I know if you’ve used a coworker or
not to build a slide deck, unless you spent a bunch of time to not do it.
Swyx [00:20:07]: I know, but like it was so, I think there’s a certain charm to
just being blatantly AI. ‘Cause I think that you’re well, you’re just honest
about There may be mistakes here that I cannot vouch for. So how much value is
there? But anyway I think, actually the real question I want to ask is, there’s
a— You were a chief of staff To Thomas. And in the pre-AI world, the that job
would’ve been a chief of staff job of like Can you prep me these slides and all
that? And now you do it yourself.
Kyle [00:20:35]: I still, I still have a chief of staff. Because, the difference
is it’s sort of the discussion every time we have some sort of technology
evolution is it’s not that the jobs the roles don’t all go away, they just
change? And so yeah, I don’t have someone spending all their time building out
slides for me and presentations ‘cause I don’t need that anymore. But now I need
that person that is able to go and find all the different connections between
humans in those discussions to help me find out, okay, I should be meeting with
this group and this team, and they have an opportunity, and I’m going to be in
San Francisco today, I’m going to be in Seattle tomorrow. Those sorts of human
connection aspects are still incredibly valuable and has always been a big part
of that chief of staff role. But now just like chiefs of staff are not opening
up, letters to process, they’re doing emails. What It’s the same thing. And now
they’re, they’re not building out as many of these presentations because they
have the the ability to have a AI take it on for, and share that with me and
great. Let’s keep moving ‘cause it’s allowing us to go faster and make better
decisions more quickly.
Swyx [00:21:45]: Awesome. Well, so we can dive into more sort of, Productivity
insights as you go. I did want to do a little bit of a brief history of
colleague and hub. Because, we started here. And then you also involved the NPM
acquisition. I did, I do want to touch upon that. And then more recently, I just
want to bring up to present day where we’re having uptime issues Which
transparently we’ve already Addressed publicly, but we’ll, we’ll discuss in the
pod. Did I miss anything? Like what, any other major highlights? Obviously,
it’s, it’s a lot of years to cover.
A Brief History of GitHub: Webhooks, Actions, Acquisitions, and Platform
Evolution
Kyle [00:22:15]: No the I think one of one highlight was right before the
acquisition closed in twenty eighteen, I got to launch the first version of
Actions
Swyx [00:22:27]: Oh
Kyle [00:22:27]: At GitHub Universe. So it was O
Swyx [00:22:29]: They’re that young?
Kyle [00:22:30]: It was October of twenty eighteen, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
Swyx [00:22:33]: Gee, Jesus.
Kyle [00:22:34]: I got to I was the engineering leader on that project and got
to launch that. And then, yeah, we did acquisitions of NPM you said, Semmle,
Dependabot Pul Panda a whole bunch of things. That was a big
Swyx [00:22:47]: Pul Panda.
Kyle [00:22:48]: Abi is doing well.
Swyx [00:22:51]: DX. Holy crap.
Kyle [00:22:52]: Did well on DX. I and like that was a that was the big shift,
after the acquisition. I had to join the sort of business side.
Swyx [00:23:00]: So I need to hit you on some of these things ‘cause you were
there. Right? And how often do I get to talk to someone who was there? But yeah,
Actions. Is that the number one source of security issues on GitHub?
Kyle [00:23:11]: Oh, sh I think that the number one source of, security issues
is probably like all, the literal code in everyone’s like underlying
repositories. I would say back further than that is, if you remember I had to
show in this graph was this is, I’m, didn’t say this before, this is ultimately
webhooks.
Swyx [00:23:30]: You yeah.
Kyle [00:23:31]: Like circa whatever it was.
Swyx [00:23:32]: It says Hookshot in there.
Kyle [00:23:32]: I forget. Yeah. Yeah, Hookshot’s in there. And so like back
then, it says GitHub Services. Do you see, it says Hookshot FE for front end,
and then it says GitHub Services. GitHub Services back in the old days, right?
You we had a repository that was Ruby code, and you could write any Ruby code in
there, and then we would execute that On your behalf As a service, and then that
way if an if you were trying to integrate with something, it didn’t we would run
it for you.
Swyx [00:23:57]: And of course no containers ‘cause
Kyle [00:23:58]: No, ‘cause it was
Swyx [00:23:59]: Well, no containers
Kyle [00:24:00]: Twenty fourteen. And so there was some isolation obviously, but
it was mostly the separations on the server level. That’s like an example as
long as the very old version of Pages, which ran on its own containerization
infrastructure, not on Actions.
Swyx [00:24:15]: Which like all-time great product.
Kyle [00:24:16]: Pages powers the internet at this point to some degree. Those
were places where like clearly there were no like issues like to my knowledge.
But it was those things where I’m looking at and going “Okay, well we can’t be
running arbitrary Ruby code,” like on everyone’s behalf. Then containerizing all
of that up intoUh into actions now where yeah the containerization, is r-really
good. The pinning most folks aren’t pinning it the like to a particular
Swyx [00:24:48]: Images
Kyle [00:24:48]: Sha, et cetera like their workflows, and so that’s a big that’s
a big place Of pain for folks if they’re just doing similar to any dependency
management, just V1 or newest or latest, I think. But, that journey from that
day to “Okay, we’re just going to run all this arbitrary code, and, it’ll
basically be okay,” to now, no, we have, really good containerization. We have a
new, underlying, ag-agent, containerization, service. It’s like we’re using it
under the hood. It’s through Azure. They recently announced it. The Azure, Dev
Compute, but it’s, very fast, very fast compute to be able to, spin up your own
cloud agents, or whatnot. We’re using it under the hood for some parts of the
new,
Swyx [00:25:36]: Microsoft Dev Box?
Kyle [00:25:37]: No. Dev Compute, yeah.
Swyx [00:25:41]: Hmm. Not finding it just yet.
Kyle [00:25:44]: Oh, it’s, it’s in there somewhere.
Swyx [00:25:46]: All right. Well, we’ll cut that out.
Kyle [00:25:47]: Sorry. But with, Dev Compute, you can, run, really fast, spin
up really, small VMs really quickly, so you’re doing a tool call
Swyx [00:25:58]: Same concept
Kyle [00:25:58]: Just do it containerize exact-exactly. So we’re using that so
definitely moving that direction to protect us from every every piece of code
that we’re ultimately running.
Swyx [00:26:07]: look, that grows into the full SDLC? Code hosting was just the
start and and then it’s grown beyond that. Let’s talk about NPM may-maybe ‘cause
I think that’s also, a very major point in the industry. I do think, it was
looking for a home. It was, kind of struggling as a business, right? I don’t
know, I don’t know how you would characterize that whole acquisition and how it
NPM, Package Security, and Keeping the Internet Running
Kyle [00:26:33]: like when we were talking to the team, I think the big thing
for the both of us was to find a way to keep NPM, which was basically powering
the internet then and way more so now to some degree running. Keep it going keep
continuing to scale. It was having scaling problems, if I recall, back at that
time. They were doing some rewrites. It
Swyx [00:27:00]: that’s cute compared to now.
Kyle [00:27:01]: Well, that’s the thing is like when I’m talking to folks now,
there’s there’s so many more underlying uses of NPM than there were back when we
had them join in with GitHub. But that was ultimately the goal. It was really
okay, we used to have pages. We have, the world’s code. Let’s make sure that we
can keep NPM running well for the world. And we put a bunch of time and
investment into fixing some of the underlying backend, changes, some of which we
talked about some of the manifest work, et cetera. And then now, really trying
to bring the the security posture of NPM up to speed. But, it is a unique
challenge in that every move that we make to make it more secure will break a
lot of people. And security is paramount. And also, we take it very seriously.
We’re, the any time that we have a problem with GitHub or we make a change that
makes us more secure but hurts, there’s, a snow day for developers or a really
bad fire that they have to go put out. And so we’ve, have changed the 2FA
policies. We’ve changed the way the tokens work. When we find tokens that have
been exposed or potentially, exposed, we invalidate them, and
Swyx [00:28:22]: I love that feature in GitHub. Yeah, it’s great
Kyle [00:28:23]: That creates issues, but, the but that’s the thing is we’re
trying to push the community, forward without necessarily, doing something that
is going to break the contract that’s been for 15 years or close to it or some
amount of years on NPM.
Slop Forks, Vendoring, and the Future of Open Source Supply Chains
Swyx [00:28:43]: I think the— So now we’re talking about, open source and
publishing. And I think there’s something here with what people are calling slop
forks, which, I think Malta from Vercel is doing. And, part of me thinks, well,
the way to get past any vulnerabilities, we just, let’s just get rid of the
concept of NPM. And we only publish source code. And anytime you want to import
it you have your coding agent look at it and then adapt whatever subset you’re
going to use into your vendor it. But, the AI vendor it. Is that realistic? I
don’t know. Is it— Will that solve all our security issues? I don’t know.
Kyle [00:29:24]: I don’t think it’ll solve I so Mitchell was just talking
Mitchell Hashimoto Was just talking about this today, and I think that I-in some
ways, it’s all all things, old or new again? Yeah, absolutely vendoring
everything. Like I do I do remember twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen.
Swyx [00:29:42]: This is Yeah. Let’s, we must return to
Kyle [00:29:43]: That’s what is We were vendoring everything. We were having
actual discussions around, or at least I remember we were “Should we take this
full thing?” “Why is this so big? We only need this one file.” And so I do think
there’s something true there where having either taking only what you need or
the dependencies just getting incredibly small over time, I think will help to
some degree, but it’s not going to solve the fundamental problem, I don’t think,
because the vulnerabilities in an agent looking at them, there’s time and time
again, there’s a million different ways in which we can convince an agent that
this thing is, secure or not and pull it in. Or we can do static code analysis
or runtime testing to say whether the code works or not. That is, I think, the
step that needs to continue to be, invested in. The question is just on, how
much scope. Should it be this enormous project that I’m pulling down, or should
it be this piece? Either most companies are running some amount of security
checking on the on the packages that they’re bringing in or vendoring. That I
think won’t change. That’s like what advanced security does to some degree,
Socket does some degree. Like everyone is doing a piece of that. How we each do
that like especially when we’re talking to enterprise customers, is just like
very different. No there’s no one wants one single way to do it. And I think
that’s always been GitHub’s, unique position in the world. I talk a lot to
maintainers, I talk a lot to folks about this. It’s we’re— we rarely start like
a process and a practice and like push it onto the community. We usually wait
for the sort of like RFC process socially or literally, everyone agreeing, and
then we’ll cement something in. Because otherwise we’re
Maintainers, RFCs, Vouching, and the Social Layer of Trust
Swyx [00:31:35]: That fits your role in the ecosystem, yeah
Kyle [00:31:36]: We’re GitHub. Yeah, we don’t want to shape the whole thing. We
want it to be figured out. But like how do you balance that like sort of Role in
the industry to keep everything as secure as is possible and make sure that
you’re you’re not going to be compromised as a human, ‘cause that’s usually how
it all happens. And Not not create a process or lock us into a flow that you’re
not going to or like Mitchell’s not going to or other open source projects
aren’t going to like. That’s always been a tricky balance for us, and I think
that’s something that we haven’t talked about enough is we’re not going to be
able to fix everything for everyone in a way that everyone is going to like. So
tell, help us, tell us what is working. When Mitchell was talking about, the
Upvote, the up
Swyx [00:32:22]: I was going to bring up his thing. Yeah.
Kyle [00:32:23]: I forget what it Yeah. When he’s talking to us, I was chatting
with him and talking to him about this and I put it on Twitter and we talked to,
also over DM, was “We’re going to keep working.” but I think the important thing
is I do actually want to hear what isn’t working for you. And as, be as specific
and clear for your project as is possible. And to every piece of credit over the
many years that we’ve known each other through the industry, he’s always done
that and I appreciate that ‘cause there are places that we need to fix up, and
we hear from him, and we’ll fix up just like we do all other kinds of
maintainers. But that that process between making those types of improvements
and being more secure and like creating, I forget what he calls it’s not the
proof process, not the claims process. Do what I’m talking about? He has that he
his projects have a way for you to kind of like,
Swyx [00:33:13]: Vouch
Kyle [00:33:13]: Vouch. Thank you. Yeah. He has like the vouch system for
saying, “Hey, you should accept my PRs.” That’s been
Swyx [00:33:20]: I just built this into GitHub. I don’t know.
Kyle [00:33:22]: Well, see, but that’s the thing is that you say that and like
he and his community really likes this and then I’ll go talk to other
maintainers and other maintainers, globally, and they’re “No, this doesn’t work
for me.” And that is the tension, but also the kind of beauty of GitHub,
depending on which way you look at it is we want to help maintainers, so we
create all these tools to let you have more control over how much you take in
from AI and PRs. But you can also use this. What You can go use this project,
and if it takes off and becomes the kind of mostly standard, then yeah, we
probably wouldn’t enforce it but we would add it in because that’s the flow that
we tend to do?
Swyx [00:34:02]: I hear a lot of people don’t know the history of the pull
request. And like like that’s how, that’s something that GitHub standardized
basically.
Kyle [00:34:08]: Yeah. It was a very messy process Like beforehand, and now the
we have the benefit of it being the process? And now we have to go and Figure
out the next best process or what adaptations change, or what does a pull
request look like when eighty percent of your PRs are just coming from your
agents and not From other devs?
Swyx [00:34:31]: Do you like the prompt request idea from Peter?
Kyle [00:34:34]: like I think that for each like each idea I think has its
merits. I’m not, I’m not avoiding saying anything good or bad, but I feel like
I’ve seen a version of we have that we have entire Thomas’ store. Take all the
assets of what you’ve built and put that in. I think that’s got great ideas.
There’s all these various permutations of the PR flow, but I think the reason
why there’s not a single answer is ultimately we’re trying to codify trust.
We’re trying to say “Okay, if Sean reviews this I’m going to trust it because
you’re Sean or you’re the senior dev or you’re the whatever.” And right now,
when we are working in a flow where an agent writes code and another agent
reviews code and then Kyle goes and looks at it the trust is kind of diffuse.
And most of the tools that we’re talking about are talking more about
verification flows. We have more assets to look at, so I can probably say
whether this is a good PR or not. But that still doesn’t solve, I think, the
human problem of I’m looking at a PR and I want to know if I can trust it. And
we’re still, we still tend to use human signals for that? Mitchell approving it
or Kyle approving it or whatever. And so I think that’s, I think that’s why most
of these options haven’t really solved it is because, it’s a social problem
ultimately. It’s a it’s a human problem to review it and agree. Or you fully
trust the tool and you’re imbuing that tool with full trust Which I think in
some cases that absolutely exists.
AI-Generated PRs, Trust, and the Waymo Analogy
Swyx [00:36:08]: And so like in the same way that there will be a tipping point
in society when we don’t allow humans to drive anymore Because machines are
measurably better than Than humans. I’m looking for that tipping point, right?
Like Mythos is ridiculously expensive. Someday we’ll have Mythos on a desktop. I
don’t know. Will, does that change the equation?
Kyle [00:36:30]: I think it’s more I took a Waymo here, and I was on my phone
and not looking around at all. There are other, self-driving, vehicles that I
would not trust while, staring at the road. And I think that trust is something
that is
Swyx [00:36:48]: Is this a Zoox thing? What is it
Kyle [00:36:50]: I think that is both. I think that is both. Like
Swyx [00:36:53]: There’s Zoox in this robo taxi. That’s it. It’s
Kyle [00:36:56]: Well, depending on what level Of self-driving. But, my point is
sort of that I think part of that is I strongly believe that’s, a mixture of
verifiable proof. Like how many accidents, how much data, and so on, and the
human aspect of how I feel when I’m in this car, what it tells me, et cetera.
And so that’s why I think some of the like Some of these some of our AI tools
tend to, imbue me with more of that feeling of trust, even if the data says this
is 100% accurate. I feel like it takes more time for us to go, “Should I trust
this or not?” And that’s in the soft sense of, startups with high agency,
weekend projects, and open source. And then there’s enterprises and regulated
industries and everything else, and that is an even harder problem to go solve
because even when it is fully verified, not only do you have to have trust from
the humans on the team, you probably have to have trust from multinational,
Swyx [00:37:55]: Oh my God
Kyle [00:37:55]: Multi governments around the world and regulating agencies. And
so that’s where I feel like until we tip over to your point on the sort of like
human EQ side of it. I feel okay this feels okay I’ve been proven enough. Then
the ball will start to roll a lot faster, where we’ll end up getting to the
“Okay, we can trust this,” and feel good about it in the Most difficult of
cases.
Reputation, Sponsors, Stars, and Bot Activity on GitHub
Swyx [00:38:18]: If human trust is the thing that matters, I feel like GitHub as
the developer social network could maybe do more there. Like vouchers are one
system But, we have star counts, and then we have Contributor rights, and that’s
it. And I feel like there should be more in that space. I don’t know if there’s
any other design decisions there.
Kyle [00:38:37]: I think that one of the places that we don’t really expose
right now in this sort of way is, some degree of like hard trust and support,
which would like for me is like sponsors is a good example of that.
Swyx [00:38:49]: Ah.
Kyle [00:38:49]: It like costs you something. To prove that I believe in your
project and I trust you To some degree or I want to support you at the very
least.
Swyx [00:38:56]: Solve payments for open source. Why not?
Kyle [00:38:58]: I think that I think that like as we keep moving forward,
right, there’s more and more projects where I’m, adding more and more dollars
into sponsors personally because I want to like support them, but I also like
know of I’ve probably never met them in person, but, I know of enough of their
work that I want to support them. I think the thing that I don’t love about
stars or commit counts or anything else is ultimately, even with all of the
various, abuse and de-spamming and deduplication work that we do or anti-abuse
work that we do, these are all, not active social signals. They’re passive ones
that are ultimately gamifiable. And you may trust me, but another open source
maintainer may not. And on what heuristic should you be, trusting me? That I
think, is kind of where some of our thinking is right now. What signal from me
is most important to you? You— If you can define that potentially, honestly in
an agentic workflow that’s what we see some of these open source projects do,
where you have GitHub actions, and then you have like an agentic workflow that’s
calling AI, and you’re setting these rules. Like if Kyle has submitted and
gotten accepted PRs across any given project and has a social handle tied to his
account in GitHub, and that social account’s older than a certain amount. Really
complex measures that matter to you ‘cause most open source projects have that
heuristic built into their heads, if not written down in the contributing
guidelines. You could take that and then go apply that and then just say, “Oh,
we’re not going to accept this PR.” Building something that is, I think,
malleable to everyone’s needs, is a little bit better, rather than going “Hmm,
this account’s too young.” Because what happens? The attackers just go and go
and create a multitude of accounts, and they wait Until it ages up. Needs to
have a certain amount of stars. That’s how star inflation happens. Need to have
a certain amount of repos
Swyx [00:40:46]: Oh my God. Yeah
Kyle [00:40:47]: With PRs. They all just create repos and submit PRs to each
other, and then they come in and do something nefarious. And so, it’s hard. It’s
hard to find the measure. So I think we’re, we’re looking more at how can we
provide you tools so you can kind of choose what’s best for you. And of course,
we’ll give you some standards. But the trust vector, gets down to I don’t know,
some version of like human digital ID like everyone’s been talking about. Like
how do I prove that it’s me
Swyx [00:41:13]: Give me your eyeballs
Kyle [00:41:14]: On the internet. Give me your eyeballs. Exactly.
Swyx [00:41:18]: The I got to keep moving on Topics, but obviously I can go all
day on this stuff because, I’ve been involved in GitHub and open source My
entire professional career. Stars. Very superficial. Everyone knows it. But I
think time to one hundred thousand stars is the fastest I’ve ever seen. Like
people just reached that in I don’t know, months. And then like at the same time
I don’t trust it right? Like how many of these are real or bot or like whatever.
I don’t know how to ask this but like what can we do about it? Like
Kyle [00:41:49]: Just
Swyx [00:41:49]: Is stars broken? Is stars fine?
Kyle [00:41:51]: I think that there’s kind of two, there’s like two pieces.
Obviously we’re constantly like trying to find ways in which like your users are
producing spam, which would, I would include like be like only doing star
gamification. When we find them, we pluck ‘em out and we,
Swyx [00:42:08]: But it’s like a Whac-A-Mole
Kyle [00:42:10]: It’s a hundred percent like a Whac-A-Mole
Swyx [00:42:11]: There’s no way
Kyle [00:42:11]: Now, powered by AI to be helpful. But I think more so what I’m
seeing is, a lot of the like fastest time to X tends to be because we’re now
inviting so many more people into like software development on GitHub That like
the zeitgeist is just swarming? And it’s
Swyx [00:42:32]: It’s not just developers anymore
Kyle [00:42:33]: And it’s not you and I. Like like however you want to say like
what a developer is it’s not just folks who have been coding for a very long
time. It’s folks that have maybe started coding or only joined in since the AI
era. And now
Swyx [00:42:44]: what’s the latest Octoverse number? I know eighty million was
my lastRem- member that a number of developers on GitHub
Kyle [00:42:50]: Oh, we’re over 200 million now.
Swyx [00:42:53]: Okay. Well, so you see?
Kyle [00:42:55]: Like over 200 million developers now.
Swyx [00:42:56]: But it’s not developers, right? It’s, it’s people with a GitHub
account.
What Counts as a Developer in the AI Era?
Kyle [00:43:00]: So, so this is, this is the biggest debate that I would say,
everyone loves to have at GitHub at this point. From my perspective, right, I
think that there’s, there’s clearly a difference between, professional
enterprise developer and then developers. But I think that I think that the idea
that we should be I don’t know, splitting hairs or segmenting developers in the
early era of software development is, not worth our not worth the time. So
Swyx [00:43:29]: When you get into gatekeeping
Kyle [00:43:31]: 100%
Swyx [00:43:31]: What is a developer?
Kyle [00:43:31]: 100%. ‘Cause I wasn’t a developer when I started writing code?
I was going to
Swyx [00:43:36]: Oh, no. I made— I cloned a thing, seven years before I learned
to code. And then I and then I wrote about my learning to code journey, and
people Just called me a fraud ‘cause I had a GitHub account. And I’m “Well, no,
I just use GitHub, but I don’t know-” “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Kyle [00:43:49]: I I remember that. I remember those sets of posts, and like
that’s, that’s b******t. So I fight very clearly on the line of, if you create
code, if you have an idea and you create it into some way of, I’m, I’m going to
run it and use the app right now, you may still use AI in that moment, but
that’s okay. At some point you’re going to do the next thing. You’re going to
create a big— You’re going to have to learn about this database. You’re going to
fix a bug, whatever. We’re all on some same journey, and those people are also
hearing about the great new agent skill package or a new CLI tool or a new
whatever. And those projects are going up because you want to be a part of this
moment, just like I wanted to be a part of the Ruby community when Ruby was
popping off when I started becoming a developer, and now I can just click the
star button. And so I think that yes, there’s clearly some amount of like
spamming and game gamification that we’re working against, but I really think
we’re just seeing this whole new cohort of folks that are moving from technology
to technology because they’re not working on a 20-year-old software application.
They’re working on a side app that they built on the weekend for their friends
or for their new idea or whatever. And that’s how you see these enormous charts
going up and to the right with With stars.
Swyx [00:44:59]: I think something that’s remarkable is the persistence or, that
GitHub extends to those folks. Usually when I see platforms go into a new
audience, they usually have to, have like a second platform with a different
name that wraps the main platform. But somehow GitHub has been able to sort of
persist and extend, and it’s friendly and whatever? So it’s, it’s nice.
Spark, Low-Code, and Always Showing the Code
Kyle [00:45:19]: I that’s partially why I think as we’ve tried to move into I
don’t know, more like low-code-y things. We so we started working on Spark as
like a way to, build an app and run it. I think that the reality is that we
anytime we try to, kind of put even a veneer on top of it without when we put a
veneer on top of something, we still always show you the code. That’s kind of
like a tenant. We’re never going to, hide the code from you ever, because what
Swyx [00:45:52]: Why would you?
Kyle [00:45:52]: That’s, yeah, that’s the whole point? However, I think that
what we learned with things like Spark is that really the value of Spark for
most devs is, easy runtime. And you may have a runtime or a host that you’re
going to use for that or you just build something and run it but, the package of
making that even more simple isn’t really needed for folks that are trying to
build software and not just trying to build, an app, which is, slightly
different, a slightly different goal. So I want to get you in, I want to get you
comfortable. I think the best thing for me as, someone that did not
traditionally come into software dev way back, I want anyone to be able to
breach that chasm and not be in the I don’t know, I feel like we’re, we’re still
in an era of, STEM. I’ve got a 12-year-old and an eight-year-old, and it’s “We
got to get ‘em into STEM,”? Over and over. And I like I do, I do the things that
good parents do. I was “Oh, you want to do coding?” “Yes, I want to do coding.”
Do coding classes. But now they’re just not afraid of doing software. And
that’s, I think, the thing that’s honestly kept me at GitHub for so long. Anyone
should be able to go and build a thing, just like I can go change a light switch
in my house. I’m not going to go into the breaker box ‘cause I’ll probably kill
myself? But, I can go change that light switch. Everyone should be able to go
and say, “This fricking app doesn’t do what I want. I want it to work like
this.” And that I think, is what’s kind of kept us all connected with GitHub
through the years and some and during the easiest of times or in the hard times
because of that opportunity of, we’re the home for all developers, and we want
everyone to be able to have that feeling that we’ve had of, had an idea, I
created it and holy s**t here it is.
Swyx [00:47:37]: Here it is. All right, I’m going to try to do more spicy
questions.
GitHub’s Hardest Scaling Moment: Growth, Agents, and Uptime
Kyle [00:47:42]: Great.
Swyx [00:47:42]: Is it an easy time now or a hard time?
Kyle [00:47:45]: Oh at GitHub? It’s a hard time. Like, it’s a hard time and
also, I was just with my team and I said, “This is also, the best and most
exciting time that I think I can remember at GitHub.” Because
Swyx [00:47:57]: Best of times, worst of times. It’s never one
Kyle [00:47:59]: ‘cause we’ve we were talking about Octoverse reports and,
usually we do an Octoverse report once a year, and we look at the numbers, and
we say, “Oh my goodness.” I was at Universe in October saying, “This was the
fastest year of growth that we’ve ever had,” right? And now we’re doing more in
a month than we did in a year last year.
Swyx [00:48:20]: You’re talking about PRs.
Kyle [00:48:21]: Commits.
Swyx [00:48:21]: Commits, yeah.
Kyle [00:48:22]: PRs. Kind of like you name it by roughly every measure that
we’re looking at, there’s some amount of sort of growth that is much bigger, and
that is breaking our system in new ways, not old ways. Like webhooks were always
notoriously, unreliable over the years?
Swyx [00:48:38]: Whose fault is that?
Kyle [00:48:39]: not anymore mine, but for a period of time, I’m sure you could
pull up a tweet that was “It was me. I’m sorry.” but, now, that got rewritten at
a scale level that is still working and is not having problems today. Now what
we’re finding isn’t just the isn’t the-The simple stuff that folks are on the
sometimes on Twitter or on the internet are “Hey, why is this like this?” Sure.
There’s absolutely silly problems that we shouldn’t exist. But now we’re talking
about, unique, novel permission problems that happen only at a scale across all
different objects or whatever, that now we have to go rewrite this underlying
system. And so it’s, there are problems that yeah, caught us off guard, which I
think I said. Like the growth is astronomical, but also we’re making such
material progress in that I’m excited once we’re once we’ve kind of like
reimagined the underlying foundation layer, or pieces of it at least, what’s
going to be possible when it’s not just all of us and all the new people that
are being developers and all of their agents and all the tools like working
together. Because that’ll still happen in that in that GitHub tool, that GitHub
community. But it’s a it’s a hard day anytime we can’t give you what you’re
looking for. We have the same problem internally. We operate through github.
Com. Of course, we have backups when things go down and whatnot for our own
operations but we feel it too. If it’s not working it’s not working for us, and
that’s kind of like the promise of dogfooding for GitHub. It’s always been true.
We’re using the same tool you’re using. We’re not using a super secret version.
We and so we also need it to be great for us for our customers of course for
open source. And now an exponential growth of agents, Doing it too.
Swyx [00:50:32]: I wanted to load for audio listeners who maybe haven’t seen
your tweets, whatever. So one billion commits in twenty-five. Now it’s two
hundred and seventy-five million per week on pace for fourteen billion this
year, if growth remains linear. Is that still the pace? I don’t know. It’s been
a
Kyle [00:50:48]: it’s, it’s speeding
Swyx [00:50:50]: Roughly.
Kyle [00:50:50]: It’s still speeding up.
Swyx [00:50:51]: It’s, it’s April, so yeah.
Kyle [00:50:51]: Exactly. This was in April.
Swyx [00:50:53]: All right. So basically you have fourteen x growth, right? Year
on year on year. And I think that’s a scaling issue. I think, I’m going to like
try to really steel man this thing. People have experienced fourteen x growth.
They haven’t had your downtime. And that’s like— C-can we go dig into that? Why?
Like what’s the— what broke? What are we doing to fix it? Like just anything for
the community to reassure them.
Why GitHub Reliability Is Breaking in New Ways
Kyle [00:51:18]: so there’s a Like I was saying, there’s a couple different
places that we’ve seen the growth issues. Some of the growth issues, which is
why we’re t— I was talking about pushing hard on more CPUs is in actions in
particular. More tools, more agents, more PRs mean more builds, more builds mean
more CPUs. And so we are expanding through not just our data center, but
obviously we were talking about moving to Azure and moving to, adding an
additional cloud compute because we simply need more CPUs. Not as much GPUs. We
definitely need GPUs too, but now CPUs are becoming a factor.
Swyx [00:51:53]: It’s very CPU heavy.
Kyle [00:51:54]: Underneath the hood when it comes to some of the underlying
services, we’ve been breaking up over the years our database infrastructure, so
that way we have, more cognitive separation between our the various services.
The place that we continue to have pain is in, permissioning. And so right now
m-many of our permissioning layers sit into a database that we like internally
call MySQL One, and old Hubbers will know what I’m talking about. And so we’ve
been pulling things out of MySQL One for many years, because like and we use we
use Vitess and we use other technologies to shard and we do it as one big
Swyx [00:52:31]: Famous thing, PlanetScale was born from this and
Kyle [00:52:32]: A hundred percent. Sam Old Hubber and friend. And so finding
these opportunities to like break this out and then do that globally. The other
thing that I think is interesting and both a unique opportunity and tricky is we
also run everything I just talked about in a black box container with GitHub
Enterprise Server for people that work on-prem. So we take everything I just
said, and we also do it on-prem, and we also do all of that and we do it in a
data residence setup for customers that need to have their data in a single
location. Each of these has the unique characteristic around how we’re sort of
storing that data in MySQL or in a permissioning setup. That’s where some of
these outages have oc-occurred, where you’re seeing it more like across the
board rather than just like the one piece
Swyx [00:53:17]: Filling the database
Kyle [00:53:17]: Isn’t quite working. Exactly. And so part of it is that. I
think there’s been some other places where agents are much more or more projects
appear to be moving towards monorepo versus we were going the other direction
for many years in the industry. Repos were smaller, but there were more of them,
and now we’re seeing the opposite. Repos are bigger, and there’s, not fewer of
them per se ‘cause there’s new growth, but, we’re just seeing many more big
repos. Big repos, big monorepos have always had, a unique performance problem.
Because each one, is slightly different if, particularly if the underlying blobs
are incredibly big Inside the repos. And so we’ve done a ton of work that you
pro— like most people haven’t probably experienced, unless you’re in this case
of the monorepo. But that Git, infrastructure layer improvement does help the
overall, system because, many of the improvements that make monorepos work
better make all repo infrastructure work better. And so, I could kind of keep
going down the line where it’s another thing where we’re moving out of, We’re
changing how we do j I’ll just say job queuing for lack of a better, explanation
changing the underlying technologies there.
Swyx [00:54:32]: I spent two years being a job queuing guy, so.
Kyle [00:54:34]: And so it’s kind of a little bit of a little bit of piece by
piece, and it’s mostly because as we were— as it was built, we built everything
in a way that assumed, I guess in some ways that the size of the pipe of work
was going to remain the same. There’s just going to be more people coming
through each of those pipes. But instead now in places whereA git push was,
generally a certain size for example, is now, no longer true.
Swyx [00:55:03]: Oh, yeah.
Kyle [00:55:03]: Or
Swyx [00:55:05]: I push a thousand
Kyle [00:55:06]: On the average. 100%
Swyx [00:55:06]: A thousand line commits like daily
Kyle [00:55:07]: Same thing with PRs. Like PRs same thing. And like we’ve talked
about optimizing that and making changes where, and there were technology
choices that did not work there? And it got slow, and it didn’t It was not fast.
It did not do what the users wanted. And so we’ve been reeling that all out and
going “Okay, that’s just not right. Let’s stop putting good money after bad and
do it the do it the right way or the right way now.” So there’s It’s a it’s a
lot of things, not quite when I’ve experienced scale at GitHub historically,
it’s almost always two options that we’ve used. We go vertical scaling,
particularly with databases, right? And we go horizontal scaling. Oh, we just
have more people using this service. Great. We’re going to add more servers, and
we rack them in our data center, or we use it in a cloud. And now we’re sort of
in a like diagonal, where like vertical doesn’t really work anymore. Horizontal
isn’t work either because we’re all We all have some CPU or GPU constraints in
the world now, and now we have to go in and like crack open services that have
been running for 10 or 15 years and go, “Okay, the rules of this service have
legitimately changed, and now we have to rewrite them.” None of this is an
excuse. This is like we’re We have to do the work. We have to make it better.
Swyx [00:56:22]: actually as an infra guy, I’m “This is like one of the most
fascinating scaling challenges I’ve ever seen.”
Kyle [00:56:26]: That’s that’s, that’s the thing that’s the thing that it’s hard
for Like when we weren’t talking about it publicly, and I was like I came out,
and I was “Hey, I just want to explain what’s going on.” Part of it comes from a
very old GitHub ethos, which is it’s our it’s our uptime. It’s down. W What I
know you’re a developer, so you’re, you’re inclined to want to understand more
what’s going on. But at the same time us going “Hey, this service didn’t,
perform the way we expected, and now we have to go change it,” we weren’t We’re
not trying to hide anything from you in that. It’s that well, that’s our problem
because you expect us to be up, and I think that’s really baked into the core,
origins of GitHub. And so now what we’re trying to do as a team is do all that
work and just tell Talk about it more and just share you more technical details,
write these blogs, write the posts, get the engineers who built it after they
finish the work, just tell you “Okay, this is what we did.” I think that’s the
contract that we want to bring back to the community and say, “Hey, we’re still
very serious about what we’re doing. We haven’t been telling you about each
piece. So let’s do that and we’re going to keep building this and scaling it in
a way to support the If it’s not 14, then it’s 30 or it’s 50 or whatever the
next exponential growth is going to be.”
Swyx [00:57:40]: First of all, fantastic answer. I think
Kyle [00:57:44]: And I apologize in advance if like any of that
Swyx [00:57:47]: I think it’s all nice
Kyle [00:57:47]: Is slightly incorrect just simply because
Swyx [00:57:49]: No
Kyle [00:57:49]: I’m not the I’m still in the weeds with this but it’s not my
day-to-day. But like that’s the thing is we’re all looking at it to that level.
Swyx [00:57:58]: And obviously, if people want to help, they can join.
Kyle [00:58:00]: Absolutely
Swyx [00:58:01]: So like I think the that is, good. I think people also would
just want to know when are, when are you through the thick of it right? Like is
there Have we identified all the issues? Is this just never-ending? Is Git
broken? Do we have to change the Git, protocol? Like what how much is breaking,
right? It’s been a while. And so I think people do want to know What’s the path
back to the reliability that everyone expects out of GitHub.
The Reliability Roadmap: Databases, Compute, and Load Testing
Kyle [00:58:30]: So like our availability in like recent few weeks has been much
better than the three weeks before that or the three weeks before that and so
forth. And so a lot of these improvements are still very much paying off for us.
I think that we’re still working on that that database piece that I mentioned,
and that just is a little bit physics a little bit of time to get it to get it
fixed up. Because we have to the w
Swyx [00:58:59]: My the answer I had in my head Was call YouTube.
Kyle [00:59:03]: So YouTube ultimately is
Swyx [00:59:04]: ‘Cause they also use Vitess.
Kyle [00:59:05]: They also use Vitess. But the,
Swyx [00:59:09]: Like whoever was the guy, the scaling guy at YouTube?
Kyle [00:59:11]: Like that’s That I believe went to PlanetScale, and was a part
of PlanetScale too. But like
Swyx [00:59:16]: Oh, you mean Sugo?
Kyle [00:59:17]: I think so. Yeah. And so, and so like
Swyx [00:59:19]: He’s at Superbase now.
Kyle [00:59:20]: Ah.
Swyx [00:59:21]: There’s a whole Postgres drama Thing there, right?
Kyle [00:59:25]: So like some of it’s that. I think the other piece of it is,
our move to get additional compute will alleviate a fair amount of this
particularly on the action side ‘cause a lot of the underlying, outages is
actually related to,
Swyx [00:59:39]: I’ll tell you actions is the it’s the root of all evil.
Kyle [00:59:42]: it’s all It has its pros
Swyx [00:59:47]: Some extent
Kyle [00:59:47]: In that it’s the core It’s the core compute layer for either
CI, side projects, et cetera.
Swyx [00:59:52]: Is the main money maker? Like is
Kyle [00:59:54]: Actions?
Swyx [00:59:55]: No? I don’t know.
Kyle [00:59:56]: like Actions
Swyx [00:59:57]: I pay a lot for compute, right?
Kyle [00:59:58]: like Actions is definitely a piece of the overall business, but
I would say that like we ultimately also
Swyx [01:00:06]: Storage
Kyle [01:00:07]: Give away so many like minutes as part of our entitlements as
that. But that’s what I was saying. Everyone’s using it. We talk about it as
CI/CD, but the reality is people use it for CI/CD and
Swyx [01:00:17]: Automation
Kyle [01:00:17]: Various processing and automation, exactly. And so like part of
it is also that like compute piece that is also alleviating some of our
availability.
Swyx [01:00:26]: This is my abuse of, actions. I have been
Kyle [01:00:29]: Oh, yeah
Swyx [01:00:29]: I have been scraping for every day, and just like I just tell
people to
Kyle [01:00:34]: Thank you for your service
Swyx [01:00:35]: Go dog because I But this is also how I track, actions all
time. So anyway,
Kyle [01:00:41]: So like some of it’s going to be that. I would say that like
each month I expect in the next three months, you’re going to see fewer and
fewer moments where we have an availability problem Where things are going to go
down, and that’s not just it’s stopped. It’s that we’re still experiencing
faster growth than ever before. It’s just that those underlying improvements
that we’ve been hard at work on, are finally paying off. It’s just that the
improvements take-It’s less about, these incremental improvements where you make
a small change, and you get this big output. It’s now material change That takes
a bit of time, and then you see a step change in our availability.
Swyx [01:01:14]: There’s a thing we used to do at Amazon, I don’t know if this
is, a thing, but, if automated software verification or simulation of load
testing and all that. I’m, I’m just like at this point, you have a whole map of
GitHub. And, while you can assume whatever growth rates on whatever dimensions
that you care about and just run it through a system, right? I feel like there’s
a way to, I don’t know, have a systems model of GitHub and, see what breaks. But
obviously, I’m pro— I’m not that close to the problem, so.
Kyle [01:01:39]: But yeah, so yes, totally. And I would say, that’s been the
journey and work that’s been happening since, I would say November to now.
Because October, right, was the time where we even said, “Oh, look at the
growth,” and, and then you start to see the chart
Swyx [01:01:53]: It doesn’t
Kyle [01:01:53]: Really pick up. And it’s oh, we tested it at N amount of scale,
and now it’s at, N cubed maybe like in some in some vectors. And so now we have
to go and build it that way and make sure that it can handle all of that scale.
Swyx [01:02:08]: Let’s talk Copilot. So how many original creators of Copilot
are there?
The State of Copilot: From Code Completion to Agents
Kyle [01:02:15]: Oh, geez.
Swyx [01:02:18]: ‘Cause I count like twelve authenticated.
Kyle [01:02:19]: We haven’t— Yeah, I forget, all joking aside, I forget the
number of people that were on, the original, GitHub Copilot team. But, there was
a bigger group.
Swyx [01:02:30]: I heard it’s, it’s Alex. It there’s, there’s, a three people
Kyle [01:02:32]: Alex worked on it. Udo worked on it. There’s a a bunch of
people that were on the team.
Swyx [01:02:35]: And then their entire management line. Okay. So enormously
successful at its in its in its day. I think the last number, I think Mario Came
to my conference, and talked about the hundred million dollar mark. I think most
recently three hundred. I might be out of date as well there.
Kyle [01:02:53]: I don’t think we shared the dollar amounts.
Swyx [01:02:54]: All right, cool. Just, what’s the state of Copilot? It’s, it’s
obviously as a concept brought into More of Microsoft. But just at GitHub.
Kyle [01:03:03]: so I think One of, one of the challenges is, that we had with
Copilot, right, is that we came out the gate with code completion, and it was
super great, powerful, et cetera. And then what we initially worked on after
that sort of, initial year and a half, was, going after fine-tuning because our
customers, the industry on the whole was really talking about, okay, well, how
do we get more more correctness or performance out of this? And so we were
working on a whole bunch of efforts to do fine-tuning on, larger and larger code
completions or, next edit suggestions with fine-tuning, et cetera.
Swyx [01:03:43]: And let me clarify. Is this fine-tuning one model or per
customer a fine-tuned model for
Kyle [01:03:48]: Per cust— Well, both. But, but, fine-tuning one model for the
overall, use, and then fine-tuning per customer that wants this as, a service
effectively. And around that time is when the next generation of models came,
and that’s around the same time that all these other AI, coding tools came to be
because the models really sped up. And so everyone kind of, will ask, “Well,
what happened to GitHub Copilot?” there’s all this time, and I would say that we
were on an era of going okay, we want to improve everyone’s results, and so
let’s focus in on fine-tuning because that’ll give us these better results. And
then the models got better. And so then ever since, we’ve been really on this
kind of journey to go, okay of course, we have, this great code completion, and
we’ve done a ton of investment in the better underlying models that we have
post-trained better, next set of suggestions with post-training language
specific models. All this stuff that kind of, sits in the ether of GitHub
Copilot is code completion, but also have now ha— now have, a single underlying,
SDK and harness for our coding agent Copilot ultimately. The new CLI, the new
desktop app, cloud agents that use the same SDK. And so there was this moment of
both, really trying to figure out what our customers want, models, Sherlocking
us a little bit, then going and saying, “Okay, what does everyone ultimately
need?” And what we think is that it’s not solely about the code generation. It’s
really about having the ability to use these coding agent brained, harnesses or
run times across, not just the coding experience where I’m going to, send a
bunch of tasks out, or I’m going to use Fleet to break up a single task or
autopilot similar to Goal all this stuff. But also how do I do that for all of
my security remediation? How do I do that for every GitHub issue that comes in,
just stick a coding agent on it just to see if it’s possible? How do go through
my repository and see all of my documentation and extract out okay, this doesn’t
actually match? That amount of sort of AI coding agent automation, I think is a
big part of what we see when we’re looking at, okay, we’re still kind of going
through a similar but very different flow. It’s just all happening at the same
time. There’s not really the same, I’m going to create an issue to track my idea
of building this. You’re probably just going to go, do it.
Swyx [01:06:22]: Just do it.
Kyle [01:06:22]: You’re going to say, “Hey, just build this,” right? And, there
are still tons of, open issues and projects, et cetera, that are using issues
like Peter and OpenClaw to be able to sic all of his agent on that. That kind of
infrastructure layer and a really great coding experience that allows you to
handle the sort of multiplexing, aspect is what we’ve built, are still building
with GitHub Copilot. And so for folks that haven’t really used GitHub Copilot
sinceThe thing that got them excited about this Which I I get. I really
encourage you to, look at especially the GitHub, Copilot app. That’s my new
daily driver. I obviously, if you prefer the CLI, also the CLI, be able to use
all the models, the bring your own key side of it. We’re still improving our own
models and using those too. And, it’s just like a very different experience, but
I think that broader sense is of like software development and how coding agents
can help throughout, not just Writing the code, or even verifying it or
deploying it is is where we have this unique, angle. The other side is the
context piece. Like
Copilot’s Future: Context, Taste, and Personal Developer Workflows
Swyx [01:07:44]: Oh, God
Kyle [01:07:44]: we’re still It’s like one of those things where I think the the
final thing that will let me ultimately, feel complete at GitHub is, when we
have this ability for GitHub to act like Kyle wants it to act Or Shawn or
whatever. And we all codify that in rules and in memory and everything else, but
Swyx [01:08:03]: Well, that’s an open research problem, right? Like it’s
Kyle [01:08:05]: A hundred percent. A hundred percent
Swyx [01:08:07]: AGI when you get it. Yeah.
Kyle [01:08:07]: A hundred percent. But, if we can even just do it where my
team, Without me having to codify everything, and as our methods shift on
purpose to be able to have that full experience and all the understanding of
what’s happening in my dependencies or open source, that feels like a big place
for us to be able to continue to provide something really unique and valuable
with GitHub Copilot.
Swyx [01:08:29]: Is there a form factor that we haven’t explored? I think like
we did code completion Then we did kind of let’s broadly call it agentic IDE
Which Cursor Famously popularized, and then now it’s, now it’s all about the
sort of agent orchestration Background agent, whatever. And then there’s the
security review. I feel like everyone’s like just throwing agents at everything.
The entire SDLC has Just, covered with agents. Are we like at the end of history
here, basically? Like is it just refinements from here on out?
Kyle [01:09:04]: I think that we’re all still in such this hypermyopic era of AI
Where the reality is that for various, boring security and governance reasons at
least for most people’s work, why is my coding agent, even if it’s all
background agents, background running not, losing all the context that’s
available to it across everything that I’m doing outside of coding? I think the
most interesting thing to me in AI is actual ambient AI, not insert assistant
name thing or, I’ve tried just about every pin in tool and whatever, and they
don’t work the way that I’m looking for them to work because they are just
trying to capture, and then they are trying to codify and then recall. And I
think the thing that I’m looking for, back to the very beginning, I’m looking to
be building out the next version of webhooks or, implementing a new feature, and
it for it to know every spec doc, every email, the conversations that I’ve had
online, everything about how this could be implemented and be able to, use that
as part of its decision-making and none of these tools are ultimately doing
this. So I think that it’s as if, software development work was a single lane
task, was like it only needs a developer. Once I once I write the perfect code,
we’ll be done here, but that’s just never been true. It’s all the context of the
other team members, what the business is doing what’s popular right now, and I
think that’s this huge opportunity for us to go much broader than really
excellent coding agents? And that is honestly why I think OpenClaw has been so
interesting is that sure, it’s connecting to all the data, sources that Kyle the
human cares about, and now my question’s “Okay, how can I take all that and use
that every day as a software dev connected together, not just have a new way to
kick off a coding agent?” And that’s where we’re at. We’re saying, “Okay, I’m
going to go use this CLI under the hood or this SDK,” but that’s not what I’m
talking about. I’m talking about I’m having a conversation with you it downloads
the podcast, and it realizes, “Oh, Kyle, sounds like Kyle needs this app or this
thing or this “ That level of
Swyx [01:11:16]: Just recommends it.
Kyle [01:11:16]: That level of, that level of connectivity I think is where we
still have a ton of ways to go in software because then when we have that red
thread we want to pull, that idea, it can not only use the perfect way to write
that code, but instead all of the sort of taste and judgment calls and expertise
that I’ve earned or that we’ve earned as a group and use it as part of the
actual implementation.
Swyx [01:11:42]: The extreme of it is AI runs your life, right? And I think
there’s a scary inversion of control in the way that I literally doing it in the
way that developers mean it in terms of frameworks Like the Hollywood principle,
“Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” Like there at some point there is an inversion
of control where, you should you stop telling what the AI, the AI what to do. AI
tells you what to do. And, that’s a little bit scary, but also, maybe better.
Kyle [01:12:10]: like Nat, I think Nat Friedman shared this in a like a Stripe
event like talking about his OpenClaw was, he connected OpenClaw to his cameras,
and it was, watching him.
Swyx [01:12:20]: It redirected his Uber. And it,
Kyle [01:12:23]: there’s a degree of this where I was I actually would love
OpenClaw to tell me to Drink water. I don’t know that I want it to be, Changing
where my car goes, but I do think that’s kind of what I’m talking about, which
is it needs to have so much more information at its disposal for it to be
helpful to me, and I still don’t think we’re, anywhere near talking about AGI.
I’m just talking about every time I have to tell you something I care about that
I’ve ever kind of said or I’ve said a dozen times, it should be able to know
that codify that or gain access to it. Like the dreaming ideas, are an attempt
to kind of do some version of this but I think there’s a much more proactive
angle that will help software devs if we can test that out a bit more.
OpenClaw, Ambient AI, and Inverting Control
Swyx [01:13:05]: Yeah. Well, the other thing about OpenClaw that reminded me Is
Microsoft has a CVP Dedicated to OpenClaw. Why?
Kyle [01:13:16]: Because you don’t think they should?
Swyx [01:13:17]: I don’t, I don’t know. I think CVP is a high title. What, why
is this so important? Like Microsoft Doesn’t even own OpenClaw. What’s, what’s
the
Kyle [01:13:29]: so I— we’re talking a lot more about this at, Microsoft Build
this year too. I think, the main thing is that what OpenClaw has done is it has
made this connection for people to have access to the resources that you have
access to and be able to do things for you in a way that previously people were
trying to codify into their own agents. And so when you think about it like in
the work context, wouldn’t it be great to have a Claw-like object that I could
actually run on my work device that or had access to my work assets, made—
worked well on Windows what that would look like. And so I think that OpenClaw
has become the personification of, a valuable agent that understands me because
it has access to all of my information, and it can use a computer. And so thus
it can do a lot more than, just a task-oriented process or like a a chat tool,
et cetera. And that’s like a bunch of the goal of Build, right? We’re at Build
this year trying to take a very different approach of it’s unapologetically
aimed at developers. We’re trying to show the bigger investment to not just say,
“Hey,” like you said, “Why do you have a CVP of OpenClaw?” Well, because, one of
the problems that we have, right, is that our agents, if you install them not on
a Mac Mini or not on a hosted device, you install them on a personal device or a
work device, we need better sandboxing at the OS level. I need to be able to use
that Claw and not, get fired. And so Microsoft is “Okay, great, let’s, do that
too.” And then it’s, okay, well, where should I be able to talk to this agent?
Should each of us just have a Claw available to us at work? Probably. And so
there you go. And continuing to contribute a ton to the open source project too.
Microsoft, I think as I’ve gotten more and more, information there’s so much
investment into the open source, projects themselves that for whatever reason
just I think there’s like this they don’t want to come off those teams don’t
want to come off as like taking any credit or getting any recognition. But so
many of these core contributors or teams are full-time just pushing into open
source projects. And, I think that’s, that kind of shows the difference between,
well, why are we looking so hard at something like Claw? Why are we looking at
sandboxing on Windows? Why are we looking at cloud versions of sandboxing? Why
are we looking— Because ultimately, we need more platform components. We don’t
need everyone to be building the same exact, top-line product. And so if we’re
building for builders, that requires us to give you all these components and
tell you what they are and how they work and why you should be interested versus
only delivering that single vertical over and over and over again.
Microsoft, Windows Sandboxing, and Platform Components for Agents
Swyx [01:16:23]: I think, my maybe one way of framing it Is that Microsoft is
the original operating systems company. And here is the new operating system for
AI.
Kyle [01:16:35]: like I think that we are also in an era where we are— we need
to help build that bridge? All joking aside operating systems need to look
different than they looked five years ago because it’s not just you using them
anymore. And that’s changed the whole idea. It’s not, “Okay, my Claw is going to
create a user account.” Doesn’t work like that? And so just just like all of us,
we all have to look much more deeply in the stack, all the way down to, the
silicon layer in Azure to be “Okay, well, What do we need now?” ‘Cause the
workloads are different. It’s not just, “Okay, we need more inference.” It’s,
“Okay, well, what type of inference do we need? What type of compute do we need
to run these agents or run these agentic flows?” it’s a really interesting kind
of like multi-layer problem, versus kind of, I would say software in the last
five or six years were all going to our events, and we’re kind of saying a
version of the same thing. SaaS product has new SaaS thing. It’s the best SaaS
thing ever.
Swyx [01:17:42]: It was boring for a while.
Kyle [01:17:43]: And so now it’s like Oh my goodness, we’re at physics.
Swyx [01:17:47]: It’s great.
Kyle [01:17:48]: We’re at physics problems. And that’s exciting.
Swyx [01:17:50]: We’re— we’re now trying to make, semicondu- room temperature
superconductors. Still. That’s, that’s, that’s never going away. No, I think,
that’s a really good overview of, everything. I think, have I have we left
anything unsaid that you wanted to really get out there that we should cover?
Build Announcements, Enterprise Adoption, and AI at Work
Kyle [01:18:07]: I’m really excited by for folks checking out, checking out the
announcements that we have at Build go you can go look at them online, take a
look. I think that I’m hoping that it’s driving, a degree of curiosity and
interest because there’s such this big shift that we’re making at Microsoft for
developers, where if you’re a daily driver of a Mac device or a Linux device,
and you’re “Okay, I don’t use Windows,” there’s improvements that are being made
that I think are going to surprise folks to just be “Oh, that’s in— they really
want to do that?” not, And I’m talking for developers. I’m not talking for I
play video games on the weekends on my Windows computer. I’m talking my daily
driver. Like-All the way from that to, okay, well, what is it like to build an
agent or build an app and deploy it and run it at work in particular? I think
that is a big piece of it where I talk all the time with the team how I build on
the weekend should be how I build at work. But if you’re working at a Fortune
one hundred or a Fortune five hundred, you’re probably not vibe coding an app
and then shipping it to some service. You got to go through security and
compliance. How can we move just as fast at work? And that’s, I think, something
that we have a bunch of different offerings for to give you that same sort of
agility and power, but in the work context. And then I will tell you I’ve
mentioned it a couple times, and, it’s very freaking cool. If you are in the
M365 land in any way, check out WorkIQ, check out FoundryIQ. These little,
oversimplifying it context engines are wild good. And, we’ve given them to our
developers at GitHub, we’ve given them to employees at GitHub as we’ve used
these tools to be able to just ask questions around everything that you have in
your work context. And with FoundryIQ, be able to just do the same exact thing
across all your existing stores. What— Not move to new tools, just connect them
in. It’s surprisingly powerful, and you your boss is still not going to get
fired, and IT is not going to turn it off because it’s leaking all this private
information. That is the trick that I think, is sometimes getting lost when
we’re talking about all these all these great new platforms. ‘Cause I can use
them, I’m “Oh, this is super powerful. Oh, and I can’t I can’t use it.” and it’s
Not because I’m at work at GitHub. It’s be
Swyx [01:20:34]: ‘Cause I’m not allowed, yeah
Kyle [01:20:35]: It’s ‘cause I’m not allowed, because they can’t do all the
things that large, complicated companies need. And so, whether it be I said,
just the kind of interesting daily driver curiosity all the way through to, “Oh,
my gosh,” “I can go use this at work tomorrow potentially,” and have that
context layer, have that intelligence, it’s a huge, it’s a huge shift. And so
check it out. I’d love to hear— I’m, I’m not shy on social. I’d love to hear
feedback. What’s working what’s not. But hopefully surprise folks a little bit.
Swyx [01:21:07]: What I’m hearing— so first of all, I think that’s, that’s a
great pitch. What I’m hearing, actually, is that you should put the WorkIQ
people next to the Copilot people. ‘Cause, the exact prob- context problem that
you named They solve enough for you to do your job, which is nuts.
Kyle [01:21:23]: So, the thing that we are lit— that’s literally what has been
Happening the last several months.
Swyx [01:21:29]: I already forecast you were going there.
Kyle [01:21:30]: It’s totally ‘cause, you’re totally right. The code, the code
and the code asset problem is a little bit unique. But otherwise
Swyx [01:21:36]: That’s it
Kyle [01:21:37]: We’re all working
Swyx [01:21:37]: It’s context
Kyle [01:21:37]: With each other now. It’s all just context, exactly.
Swyx [01:21:40]: Amazing. Great. I’m going to be there. I’m going to be doing
Kyle [01:21:43]: Great
Swyx [01:21:43]: A couple sessions there. I’m going to be interviewing Satya.
Kyle [01:21:46]: I know.
WorkIQ, Copilot Context, and What to Ask Satya
Swyx [01:21:47]: When I first started the pod, though, I had, Jeff Dean on. Jeff
like It’s like hall of fame of People I want to meet someday. Satya’s on there.
So, what should I ask Satya?
Kyle [01:21:57]: I think, I think that the best question to ask is what he
thinks is true in, two or three years from now. It seems like such a throwaway
question. But ultimately, the way that the way that he is looking at this AI
problem in, inference problem, token problem, and what we’re how we’re actually
going to be working I think you can see some of the recent shifts that have been
happening inside of Microsoft to kind of drive us to a place where it’s not
four, five, six, seven, eight different things. It’s not a lack of context
everywhere. But, why is this sort of approach in two years going to, pay off?
Because that I think
Swyx [01:22:41]: Wow, that’s a bold Okay. I’ll ask it. I’ll say you I’ll say I
prompted by you but
Kyle [01:22:45]: Absolutely
Swyx [01:22:45]: It’s a bold question because there, I think there’s a lot of,
doubts to be honest, Externally. And so, yes, I want, a straight answer from him
on that I think would reassure a lot of people, and honestly, give me a lot of
food for writing. So, thank you so much for spending your time. Thank you for
doing what you do. I think as a CEO, you don’t need to be the external face.
But, because you are authoritative, ‘cause you have so much background with
GitHub, and it’s so authentic, we on the outside feel it. So thank you for that.
Kyle [01:23:16]: Of course. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Sean.
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