← Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
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- [00:04]
Sean
Okay, we're here with Kyle Vegal, CEO of GitHub.
- [00:06]
Kyle Vegal
Welcome. Thanks for having me.
- [00:08]
Sean
You're not just CEO of GitHub. People know you as that.
- [00:10]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [00:11]
Sean
You have a new role.
- [00:12]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, so I have an expanded role now. I mean we've been working. I've been working at GitHub for 13 years and doing, you know, all things developer join 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 you know, how we bring our products to market, we're also bringing that expertise, you know, to the broader Microsoft ecosystem and, and helping every developer that uses a Microsoft product or would like to, to have a sort of similar experience that they've had with, you know, GitHub over the years. So it's a big different role in some ways, but it's also just building on the experience that, you know, I've had a GitHub of just sort of tell the truth, be authentic, show people how to use it, and then let the, you know, products speak for themselves. Not just doing that with all of Microsoft.
- [01:10]
Sean
Yeah. And we'll be releasing this in conjunction with Build, you know, lots of stuff planned and we can sort of touch on that whenever it's appropriate. Yeah, I think one of the interesting things is I rarely meet a CEO who's also a cmo.
- [01:23]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah.
- [01:23]
Sean
I think you're a very outward facing and you're very confident publicly. That's rare. Like, do you actually view yourself as CEO? Like what's. Yeah, I mean, what is your thing?
- [01:34]
Kyle Vegal
I think for me, like it's been funny, the titles have always been like, always felt a little strange to me. I Mean, I joined GitHub as a developer, you know, I mean I wrote so much of the.
- [01:46]
Sean
Let's bring that up.
- [01:47]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah.
- [01:48]
Sean
You wrote the backend.
- [01:49]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I was going through like I was going through some old photos when, you know, folks were talking about, you know, how things are being built or how others have built GitHub. I built webhooks and worked with teams building the API, built the platform layer, anything that integrated with GitHub up until really 2018, I built or ran the engineering teams. And that's kind of where my, like the beginning of my passion always was, was helping people build things, deliver them to like, their customers. And so being a developer, building for developers was always super uni. 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 2008. But all that expertise of running remote teams, doing it well became this sort of bigger role. Ultimately turning into the CEO role of how do we operate GitHub in the way that GitHub's always operated after the Microsoft acquisition. Yeah. And kind of so on from there. So I mean like for me, I think the I've, I still code, I love coding but the problem has always been like people it's a much harder problem to both support our own employees. Harder problem to communicate to developers and enterprise buyers what we're building, why it matters because 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.
- [03:40]
Sean
Yeah, apparently your commits have gone up.
- [03:44]
Kyle Vegal
What's this?
- [03:45]
Sean
What's going on?
- [03:45]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean Reese called me out pretty aggressively, so. So I mean, you know, I think, I mean as you can imagine, right. Like you can see my like normal era of being a dev in the, you know, 2013, 2014 era and then moving into management and then ultimately the COO role. I think what you see there is me like really getting back to coding thanks to AI. You know, I similar to like attaching problems between, you know, how to market and how to operate a business and how to code. I find like building agents and workflows that are connecting very disparate problems to be what's driving this. So that's like some of it's writing software. A lot of it is like connecting a ton of different data sources to like help me out. But that is completely me, you know, really, really diving in on the AI side in trying out our tools, trying out everyone's tools like but building for me, building for the like non technical leader though I'm technical, you know, and how we're able to use these tools more than just the simple like call and response that I think, you know, a lot of the like non technical your employers like you have to get, you have to use AI and so everyone uses like ChatGPT or Copilot or Claude or whatever to really get into like how is this going to help me out? I find that it's not the I need to write a blog post. I need to you know, Those simple examples, helping people find the workflows of like, 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've 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 like using work iq, go call that MCP server, grab all the transcripts, go through all the slack and then build me out the plan of like what this week's messaging actually was. That's something that was like impossible because for me I find AI in like what most of this like launch here is, is actually like less building forward. It's actually like a recursive loop backwards. I'm always looking at what had happened first. Like go back through the week and tell me what we did, what worked, what didn't work, you know, and then tell me in the next three or four days what would you tweak based on this sort of looking backwards and then looking ahead a little bit. I find that to be so much more valuable, especially for non technical because that retrospection is actually LLMs are very good at that. Finding all the patterns, pulling them out and then applying that retrospection to just a couple of days or just 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.
- [06:47]
Sean
Of course 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. He said like, we are looking back at the week. You're understanding what, what happens when you say we. That's 3,000 people.
- [07:06]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah.
- [07:09]
Sean
How?
- [07:10]
Kyle Vegal
I mean, I think, you know, when we started rolling out AI internally, beyond engineering. Right. One of the things that I was really, 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, you know, I got to teach you how to use it. What we've actually ended up doing is we've built like a set of, you know, skills internally. We have like, 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 it's usually GitHub Teams, email and Slack. So teams for video chat, generally speaking.
- [08:04]
Sean
Teams and Slack, yeah.
- [08:05]
Kyle Vegal
I mean so we use teams for video communication like but we don't use it for chat. We GitHub for a long, long history.
- [08:13]
Sean
Right.
- [08:14]
Kyle Vegal
We always talk about chat ops and like everything is built into Slack, like every command, every flow even though you've
- [08:20]
Sean
been acquired for like I don't know, eight years now.
- [08:22]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean we still use Slack. Yeah, I mean it's a purpose built tool for us and I think the reality is that moving off of it would be so bluntly expensive, you know, 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 like at all. Yeah, I mean we still use a bunch of different tools because it's you know, the purpose built tools that we need.
- [08:48]
Sean
The same doesn't go for the rest of Microsoft presumably.
- [08:50]
Kyle Vegal
I mean like the like you know, various teams like operating their own. Yeah, various ways. You know, I think it just matters what you're trying to like what you're trying to do. Yeah, yeah, but we do, you know, we do work across kind of every tool that we use and then by giving everyone access to all of that context in like the new like work IQ 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. You know 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 either automatically into like 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 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 get a pages or pushing it somewhere to host it, etc. 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. All right.
- [10:27]
Sean
I think we're going straight into the team management and productivity thing. I think a lot of people are getting various levels of LM psychosis. How do you manage the bloat of skills? Like everyone has their thing and trying to promote it to the rest of their peers in their org, right? And obviously whoever becomes a skilled influencer internally becomes like an AI leader, right?
- [10:48]
Kyle Vegal
Of sorts. Yeah.
- [10:49]
Sean
I assume you have those.
- [10:51]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean like, I think we have assume it's a mess, like. Yeah, I mean there's 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, you know, because for a while, right, like every, 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 found in 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, very well versus a skill that's going to do, like I said, that full report that doesn't really exist on our side anymore. You know, it's usually like, 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 your mega skill and you're screwed. You know, you can't do that. And so now we're really just talking about the Legos we're using and 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.
- [12:16]
Sean
Yeah. I've thought a lot about Postel's Law. I don't know if that's a term that means things to folks. It's the idea that you should be liberal in what you accept and strict in what you output. And I think that's a good framing principle for skills. This is my skills, obviously, on GitHub. I feel like everyone should have. You know how some repos in GitHub are special repos. I feel like we should sort of reify the slash skills and everyone give it some kind of special presentation.
- [12:42]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [12:42]
Sean
Anyway, so this is one of those, like, download anything, transcribe anything, and then you can string together the atomic skills that do one thing well into some kind of orchestration skill that calls other skills. I assume. Does that match?
- [12:57]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I think so. I think that the. The summarize anything totally. Like, I think the. For me summarizing something for, like, you know, I do communications, NPR and analyst relations and marketing and customer activities. And so my summarize everything is very different for each one of those, like, contexts. You know what I mean? Because 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 some of these mega skills. Yeah, but they're all just slight permutations. But those permutations are really important. It's the difference between someone reading this and going, did I make this? You know what I mean? Or like, this makes total sense. And I would expect this when I'm giving a briefing to Gartner or like whatever else.
- [14:37]
Sean
Yeah. 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 Plug in Hell basically, like when you have a framework and then you have a hundred things that you need to integrate, everyone do does like the GitHub used to be bloated, full of these things and now we don't need them anymore. Yeah. It's not easy to see skills.
- [15:00]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah. And like I think the most magical thing is that just that like I can just also crack it open. Like yeah, you know, like, yes, I could go like, you know, change the how the plugin is coded or like I could go, you know, do that now with AI. But I think there's just something more magical about getting a response back and being like that's not right. And then you just crack the skill open. You just type English words, you know, and it's different that, that, that building block is just, I think, very unique. Once, once I get everyone to kind of understand how to best, you know, how to best make those changes, you know, to get the most power out
- [15:36]
Sean
of them, is there, you know, you have your peer group of people like you, is there a common framing for something? I'm feeling which is true is that this is a golden age for former developers who are now in leadership. Right. Because you can wield the tools, you would know the right words, you're maybe not too close to the details, sure, doesn't matter. But you're more effective than someone who doesn't come from that background.
- [16:00]
Kyle Vegal
I think that the secret has always been your ability to identify patterns and solve problems. And I think that for folks like myself that don't code day to day anymore, that has made me successful as a developer, made me successful as coo, now cmo. And so now that I have access to git and write code, I'm now applying that sort of pattern finding and problem solving and I know enough still about how to then go and say, oh, I want to make an app and 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 technical leaders that became business leaders and now are going back to their apps and updating them. Good for Them. But I think that the much more interesting thing is, well, now I have this whole new set of expertise over 10 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 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 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, or where 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 15 agents on Saturday, you know, 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 like replicate that in most other senses. You know, that first time you build an app and you click it and you show someone, like, that's magical. And so being able to do that not just in code, but across all kinds of different assets, like, that's, that's huge. We were doing, we're doing our, like every year we do our revenue planning, you know, we talk about, you know, okay, what is it going to look like for next year? And of course, as you imagine, there's slideshows everywhere, you know, talking about what are we going to talk about, what's the narrative, et cetera. And so as you said, you know, I'm like, 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 like, okay, I'm just going to present this to our CRO, the cfo, their teams. Without mentioning, I built it with AI. I like built a skill to make it look very much not AI driven, just not pretty. Not pretty, but just like very clearly not AI. Like kind of like don't do anything interesting, 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 it was AI generated.
- [19:20]
Sean
Yeah.
- [19:20]
Kyle Vegal
Never once. Exactly. It didn't matter. And so now I just hit tool. 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 build a little app to manipulate the data I think is part of that upside for devs that are now in leadership roles. Because, like, the thing that I feel like, like I said before this, that's all a people. That's all people problem. I know if you've used a cowork or not to build a slide deck unless you spent a bunch of time to do it.
- [20:08]
Sean
Okay, well, so, like, I think there's a certain charm to just being blatantly AI.
- [20:11]
Kyle Vegal
Sure.
- [20:12]
Sean
I think you're like. Well, you're just honest about, like, there may be mistakes here that I cannot vouch for.
- [20:16]
Kyle Vegal
Yep.
- [20:18]
Sean
So, you know, how much value is there? But anyway, like, I think actually the real question I want to ask is, like, there's a. You were a chief of staff to Thomas. In the pre AI world, that job would have been a chief of staff job. Can you prep me these slides and all that?
- [20:34]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [20:35]
Sean
Now you do it yourself?
- [20:36]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah. I mean, like, I still have a chief of staff because, like, the difference is, like, it's sort of the discussion every time we, you know, have some sort of technology. You know, evolution is. It's not that the jobs, like, the roles don't all go away. They just change, you know. And so, yeah, I don't have someone spending all their time building out slides for me and presentations because 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, like, human connection aspects are still incredibly valuable and has always been a big part of that, like, chief of staff role. But now, just like chiefs of staff are not opening up letters to process, they're doing email. You know what I mean? It's the same thing. And now they're not building out as many of these presentations because they have the ability to have AI take it on for them and share that with me. And great, let's keep moving because it's allowing us to go faster and make better decisions more quickly.
- [21:46]
Sean
Yeah, awesome. 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 Kali GitHub.
- [21:55]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, sure.
- [21:56]
Sean
Because, like, we started here and then you also involved the NPM acquisition. 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 you've already addressed publicly, but we'll discuss in the pod.
- [22:10]
Kyle Vegal
Sure.
- [22:11]
Sean
Did I miss anything? Like any other major highlights? Obviously it's a lot of years to cover.
- [22:16]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah. No, I mean, like, I think one highlight was right before the acquisition closed in 2018, I got to launch the first version of actions@GitHub universe.
- [22:29]
Sean
They're that young.
- [22:30]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah. It was October of 2018, I think. Yeah.
- [22:34]
Sean
Jesus.
- [22:34]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah, I got to. I was an engineering leader on that project and got to launch that. And then, yeah, we did acquisitions of, you know, npm, like you said, Semel Dependabot, you know, pull Panda. Like a whole bunch of things. That was a big. Right. ABHI is doing well on dx, you know, and like, that was a. That was the big shift after the acquisition. I had to join the sort of business side.
- [23:01]
Sean
I need to hit you on some of these things because you were there. Right. And how often do I get to talk to someone but Actions. Is that the number one source of security issues on GitHub?
- [23:11]
Kyle Vegal
Oh, shh. I mean, I think that the number one source of security issues is probably like the literal code in everyone's, like, underlying repositories. I would say back further than that is, if you remember, like I had, like in this graph was this is. I didn't say this before. This is ultimately web hooks.
- [23:30]
Sean
Yes.
- [23:31]
Kyle Vegal
Like circa. Whatever it was. I forget. Yeah. Hookshot's in there. And so, like, back then it says GitHub services. Do you see? It says hookshot. Hookshot FE for front end. And this is GitHub services. GitHub services. Back in the old days, right? You, like, 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, you know, if, if, if you're trying to integrate with something and then, you know, we would run it for you.
- [23:57]
Sean
And of course, no containers.
- [23:59]
Kyle Vegal
No. Because it was 2014 you know, like. 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 non actions, which like all time great products of the mages, powers the Internet at this point at some degree those were places where clearly there were no issues 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 on everyone's behalf then containerizing all of that up into actions now where the containerization is really good. The pinning, like most folks aren't pinning it like to a particular shot, etc. You know, like their workflows. And so that's a big, that's a big place of, of, you know, pain for folks if they're just doing similar to any, you know, dependency management, just V1 or you know, newest or latest I think. But that journey from that day to like, okay, we're just going to run all this arbitrary code and like it'll basically be okay to now. No, I mean we have like really good containerization. We have a new underlying agent containerization service. It's like we're using it under the hood. It's through Azure, they recently announced it, the Azure like Dev Compute. But it's like very fast, very fast compute to be able, like spin up, you know, your own cloud agents or whatnot. We're using it under the hood for some parts of the new Microsoft dev box. No, no, no. Dev Compute.
- [25:41]
Sean
Yeah, not finding it just yet.
- [25:45]
Kyle Vegal
It's in there somewhere.
- [25:46]
Sean
All right, well we'll cut that out.
- [25:48]
Kyle Vegal
Sorry. But with Dev Compute you can run really, really fast, spin up really small VMs really quickly. So you're doing a tool call, just do it. Containerize. Exactly. So we're using that. So definitely moving that direction to protect us from every piece of code that we're ultimately running.
- [26:07]
Sean
Yeah, I mean look, that grows into the full SDLC code. Hosting was just the start and then it's going beyond that. Let's talk about NPM maybe because I think that's also like 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 how you would characterize that whole acquisition and you know how it.
- [26:33]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean like, you know, when we were talking, you know, 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, you know, running, you know, like, keep it going, continue with the scale, is having scaling problems. If I recall, back at that time they were doing some rewrites.
- [27:00]
Sean
I mean, that's cute compared to now.
- [27:02]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, well, that's the thing is like, you know, when I'm talking to folks now, like, there's, you know, there's so many more underlying uses of MPM than there were, you know, back when we. We had them join, join in with GitHub. But that was ultimately the goal. It was really like, okay, we used to have pages, we have like the world's code. Let's make sure that we can keep NPM running well, you know, 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 like some of the manifest work, et cetera. And then now, like really trying to bring the, you know, the security posture of NPM up to speed. But like, 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, like, we take it very seriously. We're like, you know, anytime that we have a problem with GitHub or we make a change that makes us more secure but hurts, there's like a snow day for developers or a really bad fire that they have to go put out. And so we have changed the two FA policies. You know, we've changed the way the tokens work. When we find tokens that have been exposed or potentially exposed, we invalidate them. And I love that feature of GitHub that creates issues. But like 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 or some amount of years on npm.
- [28:43]
Sean
Yeah, 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 like, well, the way to get past any vulnerability is 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.
- [29:17]
Kyle Vegal
It.
- [29:17]
Sean
But the AI vendor, it's. Is that realistic? I don't know. Would that solve all our security Issues, I don't know.
- [29:25]
Kyle Vegal
I mean, I don't think it will solve. Like, so Mitchell was just talking, and Mitchell Hashimoto was just talking about this today. And I think that like, in some ways it's all, you know, all things old or new again, you know, like, yeah, absolutely. Vendoring everything. Like, you know, I do, I do remember, 2013, 2014.
- [29:43]
Sean
We must return.
- [29:44]
Kyle Vegal
That's what I mean. It's like we were vendoring everything. We were having actual discussions around, like, or at least I remember we were like, should we take this full thing? Like, why is this so big? We only need this one file. And so I do think there's something true there where having, like either taking only what you need or the dependency 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, like 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 like, secure or not and pull it in. Or we can do, you know, static code analysis or, you know, runtime testing to say whether the code works or not. That is, I think the step that needs to continue to be like, invested in. The question is just on like, how much scope. Should it be this enormous project that I'm pulling down or should it be this piece? Either way, you know, most companies are running some amount of, you know, security checking on the, on the, the packages that they're bringing in or vendoring that I think won't change. That's like what, you know, advanced security does to some degree, socket does some degree, you know, 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, very different. Like, 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. Like, 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 it fits your role in. Yeah, we don't want to shape the whole thing, we want it to be figured out. But like, how do you balance that, that like, sort of, you know, role in the industry to keep everything as Secure as possible and make sure that you're, you know, you're not going to be compromised as a human because that's usually how it all happens. And not, you know, not create a process or lock us into a flow that, you know, you're not going to like or like Mitchell's not going to like, 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, you know, is we're not going to be able to fix everything for everyone in a way that everyone is going to like.
- [32:15]
Sean
Yeah.
- [32:16]
Kyle Vegal
So tell, help us, tell us what is working. When Mitchell was talking about the vote, I forget what it. Yeah, I mean, like, 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 dm. I was like, we're going to keep working, like. 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 because 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, like that process between, you know, making those types of improvements and being more secure and like creating. I forget what he calls it. It's not the proof process, not the claims process. You know what I'm talking about. He has that, like, his projects have a way for you to kind of like vouch. Thank you. Yeah, he has like the vouch system for, you know, saying, hey, you should accept my PRs. That's been built.
- [33:21]
Sean
This is a GitHub. I don't know.
- [33:22]
Kyle Vegal
Well, see, but that's the thing is that you, you say that and like he and his community really likes us. And then I'll go talk to other maintainers and other maintainers globally, and they're like, no, this, this doesn't work for me.
- [33:35]
Sean
Yeah.
- [33:36]
Kyle Vegal
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, you know, from AI and PRs. But you can also use this, you know what I mean? 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. The flow that we tend to do.
- [34:02]
Sean
You know, I think a lot of people don't know the history of the pull request.
- [34:05]
Kyle Vegal
Sure.
- [34:05]
Sean
And, like, you know, like, that's how it's something that GitHub standardized, basically.
- [34:09]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah. It was a very messy process, you know, like beforehand, and now, you know, the. We have the benefit of it being the process, you know, 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 80% of your PRs are just coming from your agents and not from other devs?
- [34:32]
Sean
You know, like the prompt request idea from Peter.
- [34:34]
Kyle Vegal
I mean, like, I think that for each, like each idea I think has its merits. Like, I'm not avoiding saying anything good or bad, but I feel like I've seen a version of, you know, we have, that we have, you know, an entire, you know, Thomas's, you know, startup. Take all the assets of what you've built and put that in. I think that's got great ideas. Like, 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, like, 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 in. 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, you know, Mitchell approving it or Kyle approving it or whatever. And so 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 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.
- [36:08]
Sean
And so, like, you Know 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 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, does that change the equation?
- [36:30]
Kyle Vegal
I think it's more like I took a Waymo here and I was on my phone and not looking around at all like there are other self driving vehicles that I would not trust while like staring at the road. And I think that that trust is something that is a Zoox dig.
- [36:50]
Sean
Like what?
- [36:50]
Kyle Vegal
I think that is both. I think that is both. You know, like there's Zoox and his robot taxi.
- [36:55]
Sean
That's it.
- [36:56]
Kyle Vegal
Well, I mean, depending on what level of self driving, you know. But my point is sort of that I think part of that is, you know, I strongly believe that that's like a mixture of verifiable proof, you know, 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, etc, 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, you know, like 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 like startups with high agency weekend projects and open source and 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 multi governments around the world, you know, regulating agencies. And so that's where I feel like until we tip over to your point, like on the sort of like human EQ side of it, like I feel okay, like this feels okay, like 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
- [38:18]
Sean
cases, you know, if human trust is the thing that matters. I feel like GitHub as the developer social network could maybe do more there. Like vouch is one system, but like we have star counts and then we have contributor rights and that's it. And like I feel like there should be more in that space. I don't know if there's any other
- [38:36]
Kyle Vegal
design decisions that I mean, I think that like one of the places that we don't really expose right now in this sort of way is like some degree of like hard trust and support. Which would like for me is like sponsors is a good example of that. It like costs you something, you know, to prove that I, I believe in your project and I like trust you to some degree. I want to support you at the very least.
- [38:57]
Sean
Okay, self payments for open source, why not?
- [38:59]
Kyle Vegal
I mean like, like I think that I like as we keep moving forward, right, there's more and more projects where I'm like adding more and more dollars into sponsors personally because I want to like support them. But I also like know of, you know, I probably never met them in person but like 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 like ultimately, even with all of the various like abuse and despamming and deduplication work that we do or anti abuse you know, work that we do, these are all like 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? 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, then you have 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 and GitHub and that social account's older than certain amount. Like really complex measures that matter to you because 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 priority. Building something that is, I think malleable to everyone's needs is a little bit better. Rather than going 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 certain amount of stars. That's how star inflation happens. Need to have certain amount of repos 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, like, it's hard to find the measure. So I think 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 like, 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? Give me your eyeballs on the Internet. Give me your eyeballs. Exactly.
- [41:19]
Sean
I got to keep moving on topics, but obviously I can go all day on this because, I mean, I've been involved in GitHub and open source my entire, you know, professional career. Stars.
- [41:30]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [41:30]
Sean
Very superficial. Everyone knows it. But I think, you know, time to 100,000 stars is the fastest I've ever seen, like, people just reach that in, I don't know, months.
- [41:39]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [41:39]
Sean
And then like at the same time, like, I don't trust it. Right. Like, how many of these are real or bought or like, whatever. I don't know how to ask this, but, like, what can we do about it? You know, it stars Broken it. Star is fine.
- [41:51]
Kyle Vegal
I think that there's kind of two. There's like two pieces. Obviously, like, we're constantly, like, trying to find ways in which, like, your users are producing spam, which what I would include, like, be like only doing star gamification. When we find them, we pluck them out, you know, and we like a whack a mold. It's 100% like a whack a mold now, like, 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, you know, 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.
- [42:31]
Sean
Yeah.
- [42:32]
Kyle Vegal
You know, it's not just developers and it's not you and I like, you know, like, however you want to say, like, what a developer is, you know, it's not just folks have been coding for a very long time. It's folks that have maybe started coding or only joined in since the AI era.
- [42:44]
Sean
What's the latest octaverse number? I know 80 million was my last member that like a number of developers on GitHub.
- [42:51]
Kyle Vegal
Oh, we're over 200 million now. Yeah.
- [42:53]
Sean
Okay. Well, you see.
- [42:54]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Over 200 million developers now.
- [42:57]
Sean
But it's not developers, right. Like it's, it's people with a GitHub account.
- [43:00]
Kyle Vegal
So like, so this is, this is the biggest debate that like I would say, like everyone loves to have at GitHub at this point. From my perspective, Right. I think that there's, there's clearly a difference between like professional enterprise developer, you know, and then developers. But I think that, I think that the idea that, you know, we should be like narrow splitting hairs or segmenting developers in the early era of software development is like not worth our, not worth the time. Yeah. So you get into gatekeeping 100%. Like 100%. Because I mean, I wasn't a developer when I started writing code. You know, I was going to, oh
- [43:37]
Sean
no, I made, I like clone the thing like seven years before I learned to code. And then I, and then I wrote about my learning code journey and people call me a fraud.
- [43:45]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [43:45]
Sean
Because I had a GitHub account. Yeah. And I'm like, well, no, I just use GitHub. But I don't know, I didn't know what.
- [43:49]
Kyle Vegal
I mean. I remember that, like, I remember those sets of posts and like that's, that's bullshit. So I fight very clearly on the line of like if you create code, if you have an idea and you create it into some way of like I'm gonna 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 gonna do the next thing. You're gonna create a big, you have to learn about this database, you're gonna fix a bug, whatever. Like 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, you know, spamming and 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. Yeah. And that's how you see these enormous charts going up and to the right with. With stars.
- [44:59]
Sean
I think something that's remarkable is the persistence or like GitHub extends to those folks. Usually when I see platforms go into a new audience, they usually have to like have like a second platform with a different name that like wraps the main platform. But somehow GitHub has been able to sort of persist and extend and it's friendly and whatever, you know, so it's nice.
- [45:19]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah. That's partially why I think as we've tried to move into like, I don't know, more like low Cody things, you know, like we started working on Spark as like a way to like build an app and run it. I think that the reality is that we, anytime we try to like kind of put even a veneer on top of it without like, like 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 like hide the code from you ever, because what, like. Yeah, that's the whole point, you know. However, I think that what we learned with things like Spark is that really the value of Spark for most devs is like 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 like the package of making that like even more simple isn't really needed. Like for folks that are trying to build software and not just trying to build like an app, which is like slightly, 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 like someone that did not like, you know, traditionally come into software dev way, way, way back, I want anyone to be able to like breach that chasm and not be in the, you know, I don't know, I feel like we're still in an era of like stem. Stem, stem. I've got a 12 year old and an 8 year old and it's like we got to get them into stem, you know, over and over. And I, I like, I do, I do the things that good parents do. I was like, oh, we 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. Like, I'm not gonna go into the breaker box because I'll probably kill myself, you know, but, like, I can go change that light switch. Everyone should be able to go and say, this freaking app doesn't do what I want. Like, I want it to work like this.
- [47:18]
Sean
Yeah.
- [47:18]
Kyle Vegal
And that, I think, is what's kind of kept us all connected with GitHub through the years and some, you know, and like, during the easiest of times or in the hard times, because of that opportunity of, like, we're the home for all developers and we want everyone to be able to have that feeling that we've had of. I had an idea, I created it, and holy shit. Like, you know, here it is.
- [47:38]
Sean
Here it is. All right. I'm going to try to do more spicy questions.
- [47:42]
Kyle Vegal
Great.
- [47:42]
Sean
Is it an easy time now or a hard time?
- [47:45]
Kyle Vegal
Oh, I get them.
- [47:46]
Sean
Yes.
- [47:46]
Kyle Vegal
I mean, it's a hard time. Like, I mean, like, it's a hard time. And also, like, I was just with my team and I said, this is also, like, the best and most exciting time that I think I can remember, like, at GitHub. Because best of times, worst of times. Yeah. I mean, because we've, you know, like, we're talking about Octaverse reports, and like, usually we do an octaverse report once a year and we look at the numbers and we say, oh, my goodness. Like, I was at Universe in October saying this is 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. You're talking about PRs commits, 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, much bigger and that is breaking our system in new ways, not old ways. Like, you know, web hooks were always notoriously unreliable over the years. You know, whose fault is that? Not anymore, Mine. But for a period of time, I'm sure you could pull up a tweet that was like, 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, like, isn't the simple stuff that folks are on the, you know, sometimes on Twitter or on the Internet are like, hey, like, why is this like this? Sure, there's absolutely, you know, silly problems that shouldn't exist, but now we're talking about, like, 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. I mean, like the growth is astronomical, but also we're making such material progress in that that I'm excited once we're, you know, once we've kind of like re. 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, you know, in that GitHub, you know, tool, that GitHub community. But it's a hard, it's a hard day anytime we can't give you what you're looking for. We have the same problem internally. I mean, we operate through GitHub.com, of course, we have backups when things go down and whatnot for our own operations, you know, but we feel it too, you know, 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. And so we also need it to be great for us, for our customers, of course, for open source. And now, you know, an exponential growth of agents doing it too.
- [50:33]
Sean
I wanted to load for audio listeners who maybe haven't seen your tweets, whatever. So 1 billion commits in 2025. Now it's 275 million per week on pace for 14 billion this year. It goes or remains linear. Is that still the pace?
- [50:48]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean, it's speeding. Still speeding up. Yeah, exactly. This was in April.
- [50:53]
Sean
All right, so Basically you have 14x growth, right? Year on year. And I think that's a scaling issue. I think I'm gonna like try to really steel man this thing, right? People have experienced 14x growth. They haven't had your downtime. And that's like, can we dig into that? Like, why? Like, what's the, what broke? What are we doing to fix it? Like you know, just anything for the community to reassure them.
- [51:18]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's, 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 I was talking about pushing hard on more CPUs, as 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 like adding in additional cloud compute because we Simply need more CPUs, not as much GPUs. Like, we definitely need GPUs too. But now CPUs are becoming a factor, you know, 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 the various services. The place that we continue to have pain is in permissioning. Right now, many of our permissioning layers sit into a database that we internally call MySQL1. And old Hubbers will know what I'm talking about. And so like we've been pulling things out of MySQL 1 for many, many years because like, and we use, you know, we use Vitessa and we use other technologies to Shardlessly one of each scale was born from this 100% SAM, Old harbor and friend. I mean like. And so finding these opportunities to like break this out and then do that globally. The other thing that I think is interesting in like both a unique opportunity and tricky is we also run everything I just talked about in a like black box container with GitHub Enterprise Server for people that work on 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 resident 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 occurred. Where you're seeing it more like across the board rather than just like that when it isn't quite working. Exactly, 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 mono repo versus we were going the other direction for many, 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 because there's new growth. But like we're just seeing many more big repositories, big repos, big monorepos have always had a unique performance problem because each one is slightly different, particularly if the underlying blobs are incredibly big inside the repos. And so We've done a ton of work that 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 like, I can kind of keep going like down the line where it's another thing where, you know, we're moving out of, we're changing how we do, like I'll just say like job queuing for lack of a better, like explanation, like changing the underlying technologies there.
- [54:32]
Sean
I spent two years being a job
- [54:34]
Kyle Vegal
queuing guy and so like it's kind of a little bit of like a little bit of piece by piece. And it's mostly because 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 where a git push was generally a certain size, for example, is now like no longer true.
- [55:03]
Sean
Oh yeah.
- [55:04]
Kyle Vegal
Or on the average commitment. Same thing with pr, you know, like PR is like same thing. And like we've like talked about optimizing that and making changes where like, and there were like technology choices that did not work there, you know, 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 like reeling that all out, you know, going, okay, that's just not right. Let's stop putting, you know, 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. Like, 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 like we're sort of in a like diagonal where like vertical doesn't really work anymore. Horizontal isn't work either because like, like we're all, we all have some CPU or GPU constraints in the world now. And now we have to go and like crack open services that have been running for 10 or 15 years and go, okay, the rules of this service have like 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.
- [56:22]
Sean
I mean, actually, as an infra guy, I'm like, this is like one of the most fascinating scaling challenges I've ever seen.
- [56:27]
Kyle Vegal
That's like, that's. That's the thing that. 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 like, hey, I just want to explain what's going on. Part of it comes from a very old GitHub, like, ethos, which is, it's our uptime, it's down. I know you're a developer, so 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 were. 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 like, 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, just share you more technical details, write these blogs, write the posts, get the engineers who built it after they finished 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, you know, 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, you know, exponential growth is going to be.
- [57:41]
Sean
Yeah. First of all, fantastic answer. I mean, I think, and I apologize
- [57:46]
Kyle Vegal
in advance if, like, any of that is, like, slightly incorrect, just simply because I'm not, you know, the. I'm, like, 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. Yeah. You know.
- [57:58]
Sean
You know, and like, obviously, if people want to help, they can join.
- [58:01]
Kyle Vegal
Absolutely.
- [58:02]
Sean
So, like, I think that is good. I think people also just want to know, like, 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. Like is git broken? Like do we have to change the git proc. Git protocol? 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.
- [58:30]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah. So I mean our availability in recent few weeks has been much better than the three weeks before that or the three weeks before that and so forth. So a lot of these improvements are still very much paying off for us. Yeah, I think that we're still working on that. You know that database piece that I mentioned and that just is a little bit physics, like a little bit of time to get it. To get it fixed up. Because we have to.
- [58:58]
Sean
The way the answer I had in my head was call YouTube.
- [59:04]
Kyle Vegal
So YouTube. Ultimately they also use the test. They also use the test. But the like whoever was the guy, the scaling guy.
- [59:11]
Sean
YouTube, you know.
- [59:11]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah. Like that's that I believe went to planet scale and it was a part of planet scale too. But like.
- [59:16]
Sean
Oh, you mean su.
- [59:17]
Kyle Vegal
I think so. Yeah. Yeah. And so. And so he's like super base now.
- [59:22]
Sean
The whole postgres drama.
- [59:24]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So I mean like some of it's that I think the other piece of it is our. Our move to get additional compute will alleviate a fair amount of this, particularly on the action side because a lot of the underlying outages is actually related
- [59:39]
Sean
to tell you Actions is the root of all evil.
- [59:43]
Kyle Vegal
I mean it's all. It's has its pros and that it's the core. It's the core compute layer for either CI Moneymaker. Actions.
- [59:55]
Sean
No, I don't know.
- [59:56]
Kyle Vegal
I mean like actions I pay a
- [59:57]
Sean
lot of for compute. Right.
- [59:59]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean like actions is like definitely a. A piece of the overall business. But I would say that like we ultimately also give away so many like minutes, you know, as part of our entitlements as that. That's what I was saying. Everyone's using it. We talk about it as cicd, but the reality is people use it for CI CD and various processing and automation. Exactly. And so I mean like part of it is also that like compute piece that is also alleviating some of our availability.
- [60:26]
Sean
This is my abuse of actions
- [60:30]
Kyle Vegal
I
- [60:30]
Sean
have been scraping for every day and just like I just.
- [60:34]
Kyle Vegal
Thank you for your service.
- [60:37]
Sean
But this is also how I track actions of time.
- [60:39]
Kyle Vegal
Sure.
- [60:39]
Sean
You know.
- [60:40]
Kyle Vegal
Sure.
- [60:40]
Sean
Yes.
- [60:40]
Kyle Vegal
Anyway, so I mean like some of it's going to be that. I would say that like each month I Expect, you know, in the next three months you're going to see like fewer and fewer moments where we have an availability problem, where things are going to go down. And that's not just it 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 their improvements take. It's less about like 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.
- [61:14]
Sean
There's a thing we used to do at Amazon, I don't know if this is like a thing, but like, you know, automated software verification or simulation of load testing and all that. Like, I'm just like, at this point you have a whole map of GitHub and like, well, you can assume whatever growth rates on whatever dimensions that you care about and just run it through the system. Right. Like, I feel like there's a way to, I don't know, have a Systems model of GitHub and like, see what breaks. But obviously I'm. I'm not that close to problems.
- [61:40]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, but I mean. Yeah, so, yes, totally. And I would say, like, that's been the journey and work that's been happening since like, I would say November to now, because October, right, was the time where we even said like, oh, look at the growth. And like, and then you, you start to see the chart, like, really, really pick up and it's like, oh, we tested it at N amount of scale and now it's at like N cubed, maybe, you know, like in some, in some vectors. And so now we have to go and build it, you know, that way and make sure that it can handle all of that scale.
- [62:09]
Sean
Let's talk copilot. Yeah. So how many original creators of Copilot are there?
- [62:15]
Kyle Vegal
Oh, geez,
- [62:19]
Sean
I count like 12.
- [62:21]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean, like, I forget, like, all joking aside, I forget the number of people that were on like the original, like GitHub Copilot team, but there was a bigger group.
- [62:31]
Sean
Alex.
- [62:33]
Kyle Vegal
Alex worked on it. Ugo worked on it. Like there's like a bunch of people
- [62:36]
Sean
and then their entire management line. Okay, so like, you know, enormously successful edits in its day. I think the last number, I think Mario came to my conference and talked about the $100 million mark. I think most recently 3. I might be out of date as well there.
- [62:53]
Kyle Vegal
I don't think we shared the dollar amounts. Yeah. Cool.
- [62:56]
Sean
Just like what's the state of copilot? It's obviously as a concept brought into more of Microsoft. Yeah, but just add GitHub.
- [63:04]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I think, you know, one of like one of the challenges is that we had with copilot, right, Is that we came out the gate with code completion. It was, you know, super great, powerful, etc. And then what we initially worked on after that sort of like initial year, year and a half was, was going after fine tuning because our customers, the industry on the whole was really talking about, okay, well how do we get 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.
- [63:44]
Sean
And let me clarify, is this fine tuning one model or per customer a fine tuned model?
- [63:49]
Kyle Vegal
Both. But like, but like fine tuning one model for the overall like use and then fine tuning per customer that wants this as like a service effectively. And around that time is when, you know, the next generation of models came and that's around the same time that, you know, all these other, you know, AI coding tools came to be because the models really, really sped up. And so everyone kind of like will ask like, well, what happened to GitHub Copilot? Like 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 like this great code completion and we've done a ton of investment in the better underlying models that we have, you know, post trained better. Next set of suggestions of post training language specific models. All this stuff that kind of like sits in the ether of GitHub Copilot is code completion, but also 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, 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, you know, coding agent brained harnesses. Or runtimes across. Not just the coding experience where I'm going to like 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 say if it's possible, how do we go through my repository and see all of my documentation and extract out? Okay, this doesn't actually match that amount 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, you know, like there's not really the same, like I'm going to create an issue to track my idea of building this. You're probably just going to go like do it. 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, you know, to be able to sick all of his agent on that, that kind of infrastructure layer and a really, really great coding experience that allows you to handle the sort of multiplexing aspect is what we've built, are still building, you know, with GitHub Copilot. And so for folks that, you know, haven't really used GitHub Copilot since the thing that got them excited about this, you know, which I like, I get. I really encourage you to like look at especially the GitHub copilot app. Like that's my new daily driver. I obviously like 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, very different experience. But I think that broader sense of like software development and how coding agents can help throughout not just writing the code or even verifying it or deploying it was where we have this unique angle. The other side is the context piece.
- [67:44]
Sean
Oh God.
- [67:45]
Kyle Vegal
I mean it's one of those things. I think 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 Sean or whatever. And we all codify that in rules and memory and everything else.
- [68:04]
Sean
That's an open research problem, right.
- [68:05]
Kyle Vegal
100%. 100%. But like 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 and my dependencies are 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.
- [68:29]
Sean
Yeah. Is there a form factor that we haven't explored? I think we did code completion, then we did broadly call it agentic ide, which Cursor famously popularized. And then now it's all about the sort of agent orchestration, background agent, whatever. And then there's the security review. I feel like everyone just don't agents at everything the entire SDLC has covered with agents. Are we like at the end of history here basically, you know, like, you know, is. Is it just refinements from here on out?
- [69:05]
Kyle Vegal
I mean I think that we're all still in such this like hyper myopic era of AI.
- [69:11]
Sean
Yeah.
- [69:11]
Kyle Vegal
Where the reality is that for various like 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 like losing all the context that's available to it across everything that I'm doing outside of coding?
- [69:30]
Sean
Yeah.
- [69:30]
Kyle Vegal
You know, like, I think the most interesting thing to me in AI is actual ambient AI, not insert, you know, assistant name thing or like 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 is back to the very beginning. I'm looking to be building out the next version of webhooks or like implementing a new feature and 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 like 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 like software development was a single lane task where it's like it only needs a developer. 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, really excellent coding agents. 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. Now my question is like, okay, how can I take all that and use that every day as a software dev, connect it 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. Exactly 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.
- [71:43]
Sean
Yeah. The extreme of it is AI runs your life.
- [71:46]
Kyle Vegal
Right.
- [71:48]
Sean
And I think there's a scary inversion of control in the way that literally doing it in the way that developers mean it in terms of frameworks like the Hollywood Principle, like, don't call me, I'll call you. Yeah, like, at some point there is an inversion of control where you stop telling what the AI what to do. AI tells you what to do. And that's a little bit scary, but also maybe better.
- [72:10]
Kyle Vegal
I mean, Nat. I think Nat Freeman shared this in a stripe event. Talking about his Open claw was like, he connected openclaw to his cameras and it was like watching he redirected his Uber. There's a degree of this where I was like, I actually would love to open call to tell me to, like, 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, like, 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, like 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.
- [73:05]
Sean
Yeah. Well, the other thing about OpenClaw that reminded me is Microsoft has a CVP dedicated to OpenClaw. Why?
- [73:16]
Kyle Vegal
Because you don't think they should?
- [73:19]
Sean
I think CVP is a high title. Why is this so important? Like Microsoft does own OpenClaw.
- [73:28]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean, like so you know, we're talking a lot more about this at Microsoft Build this year too. I think like 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 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 worked well on Windows, like what that would look like. And so I think that OpenClaw has become a personification of like 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 a chat tool, et cetera. And that's a bunch of the goal of build. 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 like 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 like get fired. And so Microsoft is like, 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, yeah. And so there you go. And you know, continuing to contribute a ton to the open source project too, like Microsoft, I think as I've gotten more and more information, like 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 like, those teams don't want to come off as like taking any credit or getting any recognition. But so many of these core contributors of teams are full time just pushing into open source projects in like, I think that's, that kind of shows the difference in like, 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, like, we need more platform components. We don't need everyone to be building the same exact like 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 like over and over and over again.
- [76:24]
Sean
Yeah. I think like my, maybe one way of framing it is that Microsoft is the original operating systems company and here's the new operating system for AI.
- [76:34]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you know, I think that we are also in an era where we are like, we need to help build that bridge. You know, like, all joking aside, like, operating systems need to look different than they looked five years ago because it's not just you using them anymore.
- [76:54]
Sean
Yeah.
- [76:55]
Kyle Vegal
You know, that's changed the whole idea. It's not okay, my claw is going to create a user account. Doesn't work like that, you know, and so just like all of us, we all have to look much, much more deeply in the stack, all the way down to the silicon layer in Azure to be like, okay, well what do we need now? Because 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, we're 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. It was boring for a while and so now it's like, oh my goodness, we're at physics. We're at physics problems. And that's exciting.
- [77:50]
Sean
Yeah, I mean we're now trying to make room temperature superconductors still.
- [77:56]
Kyle Vegal
Yep, yep.
- [77:57]
Sean
That's, that's, that's never going away. No, I think like that, that's A really good overview of like, everything. I think. Have I. Have we left anything unsaid that you wanted to really get out there that we should cover?
- [78:08]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, I mean, you know, I, I'm really excited by like, folks, you know, checking out, checking out the announcements that we have at build, like go, you know, you can go look at them online and take a look. I think that I'm hoping that it's driving like a degree of curiosity and interest because. Because there's such this big shift that we're making at Microsoft for developers where if you're a daily driver of like, you know, a Mac device or a Linux device and you're like, okay, I don't use Windows. I mean, like, there's improvements that are being made that I think are going to surprise folks to just be like, oh, that's like they really want to do that. Like, not. And I'm talking for developers. I'm not talking for. Or I play video games on the weekends on my Windows computer. I'm talking like my daily driver 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 in a Fortune 100 or Fortune 500, you're probably not vibe coding an app and then shipping it to some sort of 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, like, I've mentioned it a couple times and it's very freaking cool. Like, if you are in the M365 land in any way, check out work IQ, check out foundry IQ. These little oversimplifying that 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 Foundry iq, be able to just do the same exact thing across all your existing stores. Not move to new tools, just connect them in. It's surprisingly powerful and your boss is still not going to get fired and it's 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 great new platforms because I can use them. I'm like, oh, this is super powerful. Oh, and I can't, like, I can't use it. Like. And it's not because I'm at work at GitHub.
- [80:34]
Sean
I'm not allowed.
- [80:35]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah, because I'm not allowed. Because they can't do all the things that, that large, complicated companies need. And so whether it be, like I said, just the kind of interesting daily driver curiosity all the way through to, oh my gosh, like, 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, you know, check it out. I'd love to hear. I'm like, I'm not shy on social. I'd love to hear feedback like, what's working, what's not, but hopefully surprise folks a little bit what I'm hearing.
- [81:08]
Sean
I mean, so first of all, I think that's, that's great pitch. What I'm hearing actually is that you should put the work IQ people next to the copilot people because, like the, the exact context problem that you named.
- [81:18]
Kyle Vegal
Yeah.
- [81:18]
Sean
They solve enough for you to do your job, which is nuts.
- [81:23]
Kyle Vegal
So, like the, the, the thing that we are lit, like that's literally what has been happening the last several months.
- [81:29]
Sean
I already forecast you were.
- [81:30]
Kyle Vegal
Is like, look, totally. Because, like, like, you're totally right. The code. The code and the code asset problem is a little bit unique. But otherwise, yeah, we're all working with each other now. It's all just context. Exactly.
- [81:40]
Sean
Yeah. Amazing. Great. I'm going to be there. I'm going to be doing a couple of sessions there. I'm going to be interviewing Satya. I know when I first started the pod, I had like Jeff Dean, like, it's like hall of fame of like, I want to meet someday. Satya is on there. So, like, what should I ask Satya?
- [81:59]
Kyle Vegal
I mean, I think, I think that the best question to ask is what he thinks is true in like two or three years from now. You know, like, it seems like such a throwaway question, but ultimately the way that, the way that he is looking at this AI problem, 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, like, why is this, you know, sort of approach in two years going to pay off? Because that I think, wow, that's a bold.
- [82:43]
Sean
Okay, I'll ask it. I'll say. I'll say. Prompted by you, but absolutely, it's a bold question because, you know, I think there's a lot of doubts, to be honest, like, of course, externally and. And so, like, yes, I want, like, a straight answer from. From him on that I think think would reassure a lot of people. And honestly, like, 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, like, you know, as a CEO, you don't need to be the external face, but, like, because you are authoritative, because you have so much background with GitHub and it's so authentic, like, we on the outside feel it. So thank you for that, of course.
- [83:17]
Kyle Vegal
Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Sean.