GitHub and AI
GitHub is in a really interesting place right now. They were very early to AI coding, but it feels like they’re getting their lunch gradually (but quickly) eaten. Copilot is… fine, but it’s definitely not best in class. And I hear their CEO on podcasts and whatnot spouting metrics like “a zillion people are using Copilot”, which is pretty meaningless — this metric probably just says “there are a zillion people using VSCode and/or GitHub.” Highlighting this sort of metrics smells very much like a “big company losing but not wanting to admit it” sort of move.
I fear that GitHub is going to end up in a place where some competitor(s), gradually or all at once, finally cracks the inertia problem of “all our code and maybe also our CI/CD is on GitHub.” If this happens, they are in enormous trouble. Beyond the core capabilities of source control, pull requests, etc, a lot of GitHub’s auxiliary products (security, AI, etc) are good-but-not-great, and the “our code is already there” but of power is the biggest thing they have going for them.
A lot of this is also true with Amazon and AWS. We shall see!