Kyle Daigle has spent a dozen years helping shape GitHub from a scrappy code-sharing startup into the default home of modern software development. Now, as chief operating officer, he is on a mission to persuade developers that artificial intelligence is no longer a parlour trick but the next logical step in how they write and ship code.
Road to a billion coders
This democratisation of coding represents a fundamental shift in who can participate in software development.“I’ve been talking for the last year about getting to a billion developers,” Daigle says. “There’s no road to a billion that doesn’t run straight through India.”Daigle’s first visit to Bengaluru, postponed twice by the pandemic, comes at a moment when India is adding a million GitHub users every three months. “Eighteen million Indian developers are already on the platform, and they are the second-largest contributors to open-source and to generative-AI projects,” he notes. That pace is driven, he argues, by a growth mindset unusual even by global tech standards: “I’m not convincing anyone of the value of AI here. They’re asking how to move faster.”The anxiety felt elsewhere about whether AI will automate programmers out of work barely registers on his travel diary. “We still need people to learn how to code because coding teaches problem-solving,” Daigle insists. “What changes is that a single developer is now augmented by AI agents – semi-autonomous peers that pick up the boring but necessary parts.
