Microsoft’s GitHub chief is leaving, competition ramps up in AI coding

Microsoft’s GitHub unit, which is facing a torrent of competition from AI-powered coding tools, is losing its leader, and the company isn’t immediately naming a successor.

Thomas Dohmke, who has been CEO of GitHub since 2021, joined Microsoft in 2015 through the acquisition of his prior startup HockeyApp. Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, and Dohmke moved over to that business as product chief in mid-2021. Months later, he replaced Nat Friedman as GitHub CEO.

In a memo to employees on Monday that Dohmke shared as a blog post, he said he’s leaving GitHub to “become a founder again,” though he’ll be staying on through the end of the year “to help guide the transition.”

With Microsoft planning to invest tens of billions of dollars a year in artificial intelligence infrastructure and development, CEO Satya Nadella in January announced the formation of the CoreAI platform and tools group under former Meta executive Jay Parikh. GitHub became part of that group.

“GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon,” Dohmke wrote.

Three top GitHub executives — Vladimir Fedorov, Kyle Daigle and Elizabeth Pemmerl — will report to Microsoft CoreAI executive Julia Liuson, according to a message Parikh sent to employees on Monday that CNBC viewed.

A GitHub spokesperson declined to provide additional details.

In 2021, under Friedman’s leadership, GitHub launched Copilot in collaboration with Microsoft and OpenAI. The offering, which could suggest code for developers to add to their projects, was used by a number of customers, with an eye toward making their engineers more productive.

GitHub claims to have over 150 million registered developers, up from 73 million in October 2021.

While GitHub enjoyed a head start in AI due to its popularity as a code-sharing platform, a host of fast-growing competitors have emerged in the world of so-called vibe coding, which counts on AI models to quickly produce code for apps and websites. They include Cursor creator Anysphere, Replit and Windsurf, whose CEO was hired by Google last month as part of a $2.4 billion AI talent deal.

A Stack Overflow developer survey conducted in May and June showed that around 76% of respondents were using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code as a code editor. Roughly 18% said they were depending on Cursor, nearly 10% were using Anthropic’s Claude Code and 5% mentioned Windsurf.

Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf were all absent in the same section of last year’s survey.

Microsoft is still seeing growth from Copilot. Nadella said last month that 20 million people were using it, with the number of Copilot Enterprise customers increasing 75% quarter over quarter.

“I am more convinced than ever that the world will soon see one billion developers enabled by billions of AI agents, each imprinting human ingenuity into a new gold rush of software,” Dohmke wrote. “When that day comes, we’ll know where the path began: with GitHub.”

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