GitHub’s Growth: 225M Developers, 34.3B Commits — Jay Parikh, EVP of CoreAI, Microsoft

[00:00:00] GitHub is at the heart of all of our developments and increasingly how agents and humans collaborate as well. And I think a lot of people give GitHub a lot of for it downtime uh being the first service in this year to reach 09s in reliability. But also people don't know the extreme scale at which it is trying to evolve itself uh to fit GitHub human needs as well as agent needs. Today's interview is with Jay Parrick who is EVP of core AI at Microsoft. Uh de facto I think more or less the leader of a lot of the core AI services including GitHub. Uh we previously interviewed Kyle Dagel who's COO of GitHub and I think at GitHub Universe they release a lot of new updates as to how they're handling infrastructure layer stuff, model layer stuff, application layer uh stuff uh with copilot the obviously the original coding assistant that was launched uh almost like five six years ago now and some of the stats are really mindboggling uh about 40% of pull [00:01:00] requests on GitHub are agentbased agent created and that uh the total agent growth has six times in 6 months. So, uh the composition of GitHub has been changing a lot. Even with all that shift, um the human adoption of GitHub has been growing as well. They're now up to 225 million developers. I remember when 80 million developers was was a big deal for them. And adding basically one developer every second of every of the year. And that's enormous and mindboggling. And uh they're also trying to migrate to Azure while doing this. And it's just so much u evolution that I think it requires a lot of leadership. Fortunately, Jay has a lot of uh credentials in this area like he not only was head of engineering for Facebook but also CEO of Lace Work um and vice president of engineering for Ning and Akami where it's a lot of this like the avengers of like infrastructure security and uh social media even because don't forget GitHub is a social [00:02:00] network of developers all coming together to maintain this service that all of us rely on. It's very interesting, you know, it's it's a it's not been a smooth path and but like which among us, you know, can throw a stone when it comes to outages and and downtime. Um, definitely I think there's there's a hunt for people trying to replace GitHub, but GitHub will always be GitHub. And I think it is in all of our interest to make sure that we can help and understand the evolution of the core platform that all of us collaborate on and publish open source work and also spot security issue. We're currently in the middle of preparing for AIE code which is the last AI engineer conference of the year and the only one focused entirely on coding agents here in San Francisco. So in preparation, I thought it would be nice to release this interview to help people prepare mentally for the sheer scale and ambition and change that has happened in this one year in coding and to preview the next year as well. So of course I had to ask Jay what GitHub will look [00:03:01] like in 2027. And so I hope you stay through to the end to see his predictions. And let's go on to the interview. We're >> recording just after your keynote. How did it feel that uh congrats on another successful universe? Yeah, it was a lot of stuff to cover today. A lot of good stuff. >> A lot of good stuff. Actually, a lot of stuff that you couldn't even cover on stage cuz you didn't have time. >> That's right. That's right. >> Uh like even like the security stuff and >> those are all the different workshops going on today, tomorrow to dig in and then get hands-on keyboard. >> Yeah. >> To see how these things work. >> Uh but let's reiterate for the podcast listeners topline numbers. Uh I actually had to look up how many seconds in a year because you said there's a developer that joined every second of this year. That's 31.5 million. >> Yeah. >> Um which is very impressive. And the total number 220 million on on GitHub. >> 225. >> But who's coming? >> Okay. Well, who's coming? Well, every second there's another one. Um and like I mean just the general charts that you showed are really impressive and I think that's what people don't don't see. They they expect GitHub to just always work. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you already alluded [00:04:01] to it or said it. 225 million developers on the platform and that spans every country in the world. And last year in our octiverse reports, a new developer joined the platform every second. And that's the second straight year that that's happened, right? And then in the Octiverse report also, we talked about a couple of like main stats. And there's >> 17.9 billion code pushes. There's 34.3 billion commits. There is um 1.3 billion PRs. And then the open source community continues to build and share even more than it did last year. It's up two and a half times. So we saw 2 1.5 billion contributions on the platform in open-source community or projects. >> And for people for developers and engineers listening every that's like database rights and that's file rights and metadata comping and absolutely >> uh it's it's it's it's a it's a code social network. You've worked on social [00:05:01] networks. um how is it running this this social network [laughter] >> you know it's >> and by the way Ning >> and and Facebook yeah there's there's some pattern in here I would say it's obviously a very different set of end users or people using the the platform right but I actually think just given what's happening with with AI these days what I I think there's just a really big opportunity which is that community now can encompass so many more people, right? And historically, maybe GitHub was, hey, I'm a software engineer or I'm a product manager or maybe a designer and I can use GitHub. But now, you know, you don't have to be a, you know, a skilled software engineer to use GitHub, right? So now with coding agents can do a lot of things for you and then you can share an idea. Uh I was actually talking to another reporter the other day who you know was experimenting with something and like decided hey I want to create a repo and then I want to share that repo with people and get feedback [00:06:03] on it. So I think it's like another way of the world adopting and learning AI to build things together. And that's I said it today in the keynote, right, which is that is um one of the most like amazing things about this community is like you don't have to build alone like we're all here building together. >> Yeah. One thing that uh is very important I feel like one of the endorsements you guys got was Pete Steinberger openclaw probably one of your top 0.001% 001 percentile users um like really pushing GitHub to its limits. I think one of his interesting pushes is the end of the pull request maybe. I don't know if you guys have considered that and how that changes with agents. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think you um Peter and team are just wonderful to to work with and it's great they keep pushing us to get better and better and better and that's what we we welcome right because the technology is advancing rapidly and we want to keep iterating we want to keep building so as [00:07:04] like new paradigms come up and new ways of working arise we will keep evolving and adapting and changing the platform right so if one of these concepts is not useful or people don't want it to be required like that can be configurable right but remember across 225 million developers big enterprises small you know students etc we do have to provide a platform with many concepts and then you should be able to assemble these concepts together and however you want to do work right there's repos I have that I tinker with and play with you know and I don't do PRs right and to me I just like I'm just constantly just firing in ideas and I'm just like building building building building and I don't want to deal with issues or PRs anything right so again the platform should allow and have the affordances for these things so we'll keep adapting >> yeah yeah so it's interesting I also [00:08:04] there's an concept of maybe code is an abstraction above just the executable software that gets run um one of your repos that you featured on your keynote very prominent was one of my my speakers, uh, Matt PCO. >> Uhhuh. Yes. >> Who it's a it's a markdown folder. It's just markdown. >> And but like it does make me think like you know how GitHub has the the whole like language breakdown like oh this this repo is like 76% Rust >> 50% doesn't matter anymore, right? So like what is a repo? What is what is code even? What are we storing? Right? Because like >> you need much more than just the executable file. >> Yeah, I think there is still a lot. I agree with you. I think that there's still also a lot of code that exists and you think about all of the code that's been written in Java andnet that's running businesscritical massive businesses today right so those are all in the process of like you know you have to make security fixes you're modernizing them you're still optimizing [00:09:05] them you're still bug fixing them so remember it's you know spanning a lot of different types of you know content text and some of these things are decades old, right? And some of these things are being viodated into production while we're talking, right? So that's the I think where the tools have to be flexible and there's lots of choice out there, right? And we also care and believe that developers need choice, right? I'm a developer. I'm finicky about certain things and you know, I want certain things because I have in some ways like my personality or there's a craft that I have that I express using with the tools that I use. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Um, a couple other things I wanted to hit on as well. Fusion, >> very big deal. Uh, to me it is like uh the sort of meta abstraction of what a harness is. Like co-pilot was the first harness >> uh in you know uh three years now, four years, four years maybe. >> Fourish. >> Yeah. and and and but like the really the core job of a harness at its very [00:10:06] very root is like making the most out of the model capabilities and at at you know very part of it is is model routing. Uh can you dive a little bit more into that uh why it's so important for you to establish like leadership in that area? >> Yeah, so a few things here which is one is we have and I would connect a couple things here. We've talked a little bit and released more information today about the the copilot harness and that harness as we've been working on it for a while. We believe it's important the SDK part of it is yes and so you can take that SDK and go build other applications with it right and I've done that and lots of people have as well and that harness itself supports a bunch of different things but one of the key tenants principles behind it is multi-model right and you can kind of decide where you want to plug into that harness as well so one is it does support and we constantly are doing work to make that harness better and better and better and you have to adapt it right based on what's [00:11:07] happening MCP other tools that you need for coding or other things different models that come in as well so the harness is there then you need some intelligence around how to take a task take a prompt take some item that is going to be some eventual unit of completed software work and dissect that and take in some ways the cognitive load off of you as an engineer that has all of these models that are different price performance and stuff like that and say, "Hey, we can just like optimize that for you. We can get you the best quality really fast and much more cheaply." So, we'll keep iterating on this. We have lots more ideas. We will continue to make this better. The way I see it though is like you think about the harness and fusion kind of ebbing and flowing together because you're solving exactly that problem or that kind of job to you know job for the developer is [00:12:09] that orchestration of all the tools the way you're doing your work but you want to have fusion which helps you figure out which model because there's so many choice today. >> Yeah. Um and uh I think that model choice is very important and I think I've obviously had Satia on on the podcast actually here uh to talk about that as an increasing message of Microsoft. One other thing I really like that you guys are working on is like basically co-pilot across every surface. Um you have a great mobile app uh desktop app you guys showed it. My question there is do you feel the need to innovate there or is it basically just the Microsoft branded version of what other people also have? Right? like do you have to innovate on UI or can you just be good at the model layer and you're you're fine. I think it's both and I think it's you know innovation at the is in some ways what I in many ways what I talked about today it's like evolving every layer and that's like the deep down low-level infrastructure and storage and compute and network and security and everything and then think kind of platform so we talked about git [00:13:10] and there's actions and there's the AI gateway and there's lots of other services that power git today and then you have kind of workflows you have the different surfaces as well So I think it is important to have that all be great because that is a in many ways a paved path so to speak. So for us it is innovation and evolution at every layer of the stack and the the I would say a couple of maybe one other thing which is when you're using our surfaces like the GitHub copilot app or VS code or you're in.com. Yes. Now they're all connected using the same harness. So that's like really powerful because you can be firing something off on your phone and then you can pick it up on your desktop or you know your your laptop somewhere else continue work or hey I have this other idea let me just like pop it into my phone and and it will keep going but it is important that all that context stays in with you right in your repo in [00:14:10] your issues in your PRs in your security findings and it doesn't model it doesn't matter which model you're using you can use different models, but all that context, the memory, the preferences, that intelligence engine that I talked about this morning, it's all compounding for you in one place. Today, if you're using different other tools, there is no way if you're using one tool from one other provider here and then you flip to another one, they don't compound their intelligence together, right? So that's what we want to try to solve is like you should be able to get more and more work done and it's going to be cheaper, better, faster for you because you're using the the power of our platform and our tools, but you can still customize it quite a bit. You can use different models, you can use Fusion, you can use other tools as well. >> Yeah. Amazing. Um, one part I wanted to leave towards the end was the security stuff that we alluded to. you have you have uh enormous uh responsibility and I think it's very top of mind obviously recently with the PHP stuff as well. [00:15:12] >> Um what's going like what do you want people to know just in the general like what GitHub is doing for people. Yeah. So, lots of work going on here. We still have lots of work to do. A few things here. One from a product or a feature perspective. We talked about a number of things that we're doing around like now we have code review max and that should, you know, even help find higher severity, more obscure bugs in the code, etc. So, really important to make sure we're generating so much more code. We want to make sure the quality bar doesn't slip. things like code review, copilot code review help you maintain that quality bar. Second would be everything that we're doing in security and GitHub advanced security and now having AI scan scanning technology there and like we showed in the keynote demo where >> Damian pushed a secret you know by accident right but it blocked it from even getting entered into the repo. So we have a lot more happening here deep scanning that can look for you know not [00:16:14] just sort of the surface level vulnerabilities but we'll keep we have a lot of stuff coming here there was a number of deep dives today that workshops so you can plum in more of the more sophisticated AI scanning into your workflow into the way you need to deliver software and then there is a lot of collaboration going on as we talked about between Microsoft security team and the GitHub security team both on like hardening the platform but also working with maintainers open source out there doing a bunch of work on like limiting the exposures of package managers like npm right now and you know having time delays and taking down uh you know repos that have been compromised and so a lot of ongoing work there kind of daily improvements that we're doing working with the community working with the open source projects the maintainers and then all of Microsoft is investing in hardening this is much you know like it's top of mind [00:17:15] for everybody. >> Yeah. Amazing. I I think one thing that is on my mind in terms of the relationship between security and open source. I think GitHub and our supply chain of open source is predicated on the idea that code is expensive and maybe code is cheap now. Maybe security review is actually cheap and actually the best way to secure our systems is to vendor everything or rewrite everything because it's cheap like whatever. Uh and not rely on open source. I I don't know if there's like a like there's that field and then or there's like >> there's that opinion. >> There's that opinion which is like well let's like my my dependencies are like 2,00 core pieces of software that every that everyone uses. they they're all vulnerably surface areas, right? Maybe I just reduce them to 20. Uh there's I don't know if you have a point of view on that or if that's too wild. >> I I think I don't think it's too wild because I think it is a question we get asked, right? In terms of what people are doing. Uh I think there are [00:18:18] >> I don't think that that's a panacea either, right? Because hey, I have 2,000 open source projects I use in my thing. I'm going to get rid of, >> you know, 1980 of them and then 20 of them I'll use, but the other 1980 I've got to maintain now, right? >> So, it is one of those where you have to choose where you're going to like put your dollars, your people, your time. And I also think that there's just so much happening that's important and valuable in open source. And I don't think that's going to stop. If anything, I think the value of open source to businesses, to builders, to creators out there only increases from here. And again, I think let's solve the problem, which is like let's make the stuff in open source secure versus everybody going into like some walled garden approach. >> Yeah. Um, so closing question. I'm in a business I'm in a mode of asking people for predictions. What are we going to see from GitHub by this time next year? [00:19:18] You're going to see a few things which is one is we'll continue down this path that we talked about today which is how do we keep evolving every layer of the stack that's a theme that has been with us for a while but I think we finally put it together in some way to tell the story from the bottom kind of infrastructury layers all the way up to this >> will the move be to to Azure be done >> that's the plan next year next year that's a pretty what we're what we're aiming for right >> and Listen, you saw the you saw the scaling graphs today. They're pretty pretty wild. >> And so we got to keep evolving. We got to keep moving fast. We've got to make step function improvements in every layer of the stack. So we'll keep sharing that because I think it's like really interesting hard engineering challenges to share with the community. Number two is people are changing the way they work, right? In terms of how we think about building software and deploying it and optimizing it. today. I'm guessing that it's going to look, you know, quite a bit different a year from now. And what does it look like? [00:20:19] Are we managing thousands of agents versus, you know, dozens or hundreds? I don't know. So, we've got to continue to build the platform with the right primitives and so that you can compose those primitives for however you want to work, right? So, we'll see, but we're going to keep evolving. You'll see us infrastructure scale stuff will be a constant theme from us. what are these platform services that are evolving so that you can take these building blocks put them together for however you need to work. I would say another thing that is going to be more top of- mind is one security which we talked about two is just like POPS or like hey how do I manage all of my spend in tokens and you know because it is a it's a a very popular topic these days >> and you guys showed off the cost control stuff that and that that is actually something the labs don't do because they want you to spend as much as you want. We have a lot of [laughter] other things where we break it down into here's you know for for an organization here's all the things that we do to inform you [00:21:19] about your spend here's the things where we can guide you to like optimize your spend saying hey you're using this model for these types of use cases maybe you should use this other model so we will continue to make recommendations in the product and then for the especially the fortune 500 they want governance they want to be able to put in limits you know whatever so we have to provide the controls the governance there as Yeah, as a company leader, I don't mind that you're spending my money on tokens. Just show me that it's spent well. >> So, that's how can we help you and lots of other people close the loop that, hey, I spent, you know, a,000 bucks on tokens this week. >> And then if you can say, hey, I generated $25,000 in revenue, then you may like, hey, that's pretty good. >> I think revenue is a bit too like I'm not responsible for revenue as a coder, right? But at least I ship features. I think being able to talk about how that turns into some ROI, maybe not revenue, >> cost savings, we know cost, >> cost savings or hey, this increased [00:22:20] engagement or retention or it improved seesat. These are all things that are measurable and as a product team and engineer team, you should be attached to these outcome metrics. >> Yeah. Awesome. Well, uh, looking forward to having a continuing relationship. Congrats on another successful universe. >> Thank you so much. Something I really want to shout out is whoever did the GitHub universe badge. Like I would come to this conference just for this because [laughter] you these things I usually throw away. I display so there's a lot of like e-waste I guess from these. But this is a game boy. >> It has a little program it actually just hook it up to GitHub Copilot. >> It was made with Copilot. >> Yes, it was made. >> I told them to like Okay, well tell tell us the story about like putting putting all this together because a lot of developers want to tinker with hardware. Um and and the hardware software interface like that's something that models can do now that I don't have to know every little bit of. >> Should try it out. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank you so much. >> Thank you. Good to see you. >> Yeah. Thank you.