GitHub will lose its chief executive officer by the end of the year as Thomas Dohmke departs to launch a new start-up, drawing the code-hosting giant closer to Microsoft’s artificial-intelligence engine.

Dohmke, who has led the Microsoft-owned platform since late 2021, confirmed his decision in a company blog. “I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again,” he wrote, adding that the move was prompted by “startup roots” that had begun tugging at him. He will stay on through December to help manage the hand-over.

Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 and had allowed it to run with a degree of autonomy. That distance is narrowing. The Verge reported that GitHub’s leadership will now report directly to Microsoft’s CoreAI team, a unit overseen by former Meta executive Jay Parikh. “GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation, with more details shared soon,” Dohmke told employees in an internal memo.

The shift comes as competition intensifies over artificial-intelligence tools for software developers. During Dohmke’s tenure the company rolled out GitHub Copilot, a code-generation assistant that has attracted more than 20 million users. He has called the product “the greatest change to software development since the advent of the personal computer”.

Dohmke’s impending exit follows nearly four years at the helm. In a note to staff seen by Bloomberg he thanked GitHub’s employees, known internally as Hubbers, for “the ride of a lifetime” and described the past decade at Microsoft and GitHub as a privilege.

Microsoft has not named a successor. Instead, GitHub’s chief product officer Mario Rodriguez will report to Asha Sharma, head of product for Microsoft’s AI platform, according to Reuters. Julia Liuson, the Microsoft developer division head who previously oversaw GitHub, will continue to handle revenue, engineering and support.

GitHub hosts more than 150 million developers and over one billion repositories. Dohmke said AI-related projects on the platform had doubled in the past year alone. He predicted an era in which “billions of AI agents” enable one billion developers, positioning the service at the heart of an expected software boom.

The consolidation under CoreAI signals Microsoft’s determination to embed generative AI across its developer ecosystem while streamlining management. What role Dohmke’s yet-to-be-named venture will play in that landscape remains to be seen once he steps away at year-end.

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