Dohmke: Developer tool differentiation will come from UX, not models
Thomas Dohmke · No Priors Ep 106 | With GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke · Mar 13, 2025 · at 26:39
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke discusses model commoditization and where value will accrue in software engineering tools with Elad Gil.
0:00 / 0:23exact quote · 23.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And so I think the differentiation is going to come from both, you know, where the developer gets the most The best experience and doing that day to day, right? Like where can I, you know, start my morning, pick up, you know, something I want to work on, explore my creativity and get the job done with the least amount of frustration and the highest amount of ROI in terms of what can I ship”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Thomas Dohmke
Dohmke: Copilot will resolve GitHub issues via draft PRs in 2025
“But we think, you know in 20, 25, we get into a place where you can assign a GitHub issue, a well-defined GitHub issue to a co-pilot and then it starts creating a draft pull request and it outlines the plan and then it works through its plan and you can, simil…”
Dohmke: AI agents remain far from replacing median developers in systems thinking
“I think that's the part where we're far away from agents actually being good enough to take a very rough idea and break it down to small pieces without you as developer or as architect, or even when planning your travel, constantly getting questions back of wh…”
Dohmke: Software teams will always require human review before production merges
“And while we don't believe that goes away from a pure security and trust perspective, you always want to have, you know, Another human in the loop before you merge code into production.”
Dohmke: Programming languages remain the essential deterministic layer below AI prompts
“We have the machine language layer, you know, which is Python or Ruby or Rust, right? Those are effectively abstractions of the chipset and the machine instruction set. And that's the last layer that's deterministic, right? Like programming language inherently…”
Dohmke: AI will converge product management, design, and engineering roles
“I think tomorrow you're going to, as a designer, type effectively the same specification as a product manager and you have, you know, an AI to render the code for the wireframes and then apply, you know, grounding out of your design system to make it look like…”
Dohmke: Completely personalized, natural-language software will arrive in five years
“I think that future that will happen
in the next five years, for sure.
It's just the question is how, how good this job is going to be, and can I just tell it, Springbank is coming up, same hotel, same family, you know, say, and it books me the trip, and the …”