Faced with fierce competition from artificial intelligence-driven coding tools, Microsoft's GitHub unit is losing its leader, and the company has not yet announced a successor. Thomas Domke, who has served as GitHub CEO since 2021, joined the company in 2015 through the acquisition of his former startup HockeyApp by Microsoft.
GitHub CEO Thomas Domke
Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, and Domke moved to the business as head of product in mid-2021, succeeding Nat Friedman as GitHub CEO a few months later.
In a memo to employees on Monday that Domke also posted on his blog, he said he would "return to being a founder" after leaving the company but would stay on through the end of the year "to help guide the transition."
Microsoft plans to invest tens of billions of dollars each year in artificial intelligence infrastructure and development. CEO Satya Nadella announced the establishment of the CoreAI Platform and Tools Division in January this year, led by former Meta executive Jay Parikh, and GitHub was included in this division.
"GitHub and its leadership team will continue to deliver on their mission as part of Microsoft's CoreAI organization, and more details will be announced soon," Domke wrote in the memo.
A GitHub spokesperson declined to provide further details.
In 2021, under Friedman's leadership, GitHub launched Copilot in partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI. This tool can recommend code that developers can add to their projects and is used by many customers to improve the work efficiency of engineers.
GitHub said it has more than 150 million registered developers, a significant increase from 73 million in October 2021.
Although GitHub has a first-mover advantage in artificial intelligence thanks to its popularity as a code-sharing platform, a number of fast-growing competitors have emerged in the so-called "vibe coding" field. Tools that rely on artificial intelligence models to quickly generate code for apps and websites include Anysphere, the developer of Cursor, Replit, and Windsurf. Among them, Windsurf’s CEO joined Google last month as part of a $2.4 billion AI talent deal.
A Stack Overflow developer survey conducted from May to June this year showed that about 76% of respondents used Microsoft's Visual Studio Code as a code editor, about 18% relied on Cursor, nearly 10% used Anthropic's Claude Code, and 5% mentioned Windsurf.
In the same part of last year's survey, Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf were all absent.
Microsoft's Copilot is still growing. Nadella said last month that 20 million people are already using the tool, with the number of Copilot Enterprise customers growing 75% month over month.
"I am more convinced than ever that the world will soon witness a billion developers empowered by billions of AI agents, each bringing human creativity to a new software gold rush," Domke wrote. "When that day comes, we will know where the road begins: GitHub."