GitHub's plan for Agents — Kyle Daigle, GitHub

**swyx** (0:04)
Okay, we're here with Kyle Daigle, CEO of GitHub.

**Kyle Daigle** (0:06)
Welcome. Thanks for having me.

**swyx** (0:08)
You're not just CEO of GitHub, people know you as that.

**Kyle Daigle** (0:10)
Yeah.

**swyx** (0:10)
You have a new role.

**Kyle Daigle** (0:11)
Yeah, so I have an expanded role now. I mean, we've been working at GitHub for 13 years, and doing all things developer joined 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 how we bring our products to market, we're also bringing that expertise to the broader Microsoft ecosystem, and helping every developer that uses a Microsoft product, or would like to, to have a sort of similar experience they've had with 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 at GitHub of just sort of, tell the truth, be authentic, show people how to use it, and then let the products speak for themselves, not just doing that with all of Microsoft.

**swyx** (1:09)
Yeah, and we'll be releasing this in conjunction with Build. You have lots of stuff planned, and we can sort of touch on that whenever it's appropriate. I think one of the interesting things is, you rarely meet a COO who's also a CMO. I think you're very outward-facing, and you're very confident publicly. That's rare. Do you actually view yourself as COO?
What is your thing?

**Kyle Daigle** (1:33)
I think for me, it's been funny. The titles have always felt a little strange to me. I joined GitHub as a developer.
I wrote so much of the...

**swyx** (1:45)
Let's bring that up. Yeah. You wrote the backends?

**Kyle Daigle** (1:48)
Yeah.
I was going through some old photos when folks were talking about how things were being built or how there was a build GitHub. I built webhooks and worked with teams building API, built the platform layer, anything that integrated with GitHub. Up until really 2018, I was built or ran the engineering teams. That's where the beginning of my passion always was, was helping people build things, deliver them to their customers. Being a developer, building for developers was always super unique. 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. Like 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 COO role of how do we operate GitHub in the way that GitHub's always operated after the Microsoft acquisition.
And so on from there. So for me, I still code, I love coding, but the problem has always been 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.

**swyx** (3:40)
Yeah, apparently, your commits have gone up. Yeah. What's this? What's going on?

**Kyle Daigle** (3:45)
Yeah, I mean, Rui's called me out pretty aggressively. So I mean, I think, as you can imagine, right, you can see my normal era of being a dev in 2013, 2014 era, and then moving into management, and then ultimately the COO role. I think what you see there is me really getting back to coding thanks to AI.
I'm similar to attaching problems between how to market and how to operate a business and how to code. I find building agents and workflows that are connecting very disparate problems to be what's driving this. So some of it's writing software, a lot of it is connecting a ton of different data sources to help me out.
But that is completely me really, really diving in on the AI side, in trying out our tools, trying out everyone's tools. But building for me, building for the non-technical leader, though I'm technical, and how we're able to use these tools more than just the simple call and response, that I think a lot of non-technical, your employer is like, you have to get, you have to use AI, and so everyone uses like Chetjipiti 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 where we use Teams, so like using WorkIQ, 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 and like what most of this launch here 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, and then tell me in the next three or four days, what would you tweak based on this sort of like 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 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. It's all a bunch of apps that I've built and launched, like 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.