AI Won't Replace Programmers. But Teaching Kids to Code Will.

Every expert seems to be saying "Don't learn to code, AI will replace programmers." But the CEO of the world's largest developer platform is calling that advice dead wrong.

Thomas Dohmke leads GitHub—the platform where 150 million developers build the software that runs our world. From a bootstrapped German startup to Microsoft acquisition to running a billion-dollar platform, he's witnessed the entire evolution of how code gets written.

In this candid conversation, Dohmke reveals why **coding literacy should be taught like math in schools**, how AI is making developers more powerful (not obsolete), and the surprising journey from East Berlin to Silicon Valley that shaped his philosophy on technology and human potential.

Thomas: My name is Thomas and I'm a developer. I've been developing software since the early 1990s and today my role is mostly being the GitHub CEO leading the largest developer platform on this planet.

I was born in 1978 in East Berlin when Germany was divided into two countries, so I was on the eastern side in Berlin in a suburb called Matzan. I had a normal childhood, but I was fascinated by technology, remote control cars, little computer games. In 1989, the wall fell and that opened up a whole new world to me as an 11 year old. From a toy perspective, getting access to Lego and Mickey Mouse, but also to computers.

In the early 90s I bought my first computer, Commodore 64 and after university, I went to technical university in Berlin. I actually went into the automotive industry. I started working at Mercedes back then it was called DaimlerChrysler working on driver assistance systems for the S-Class, and I did that for a while and then switched to the supplier side, to Bosch, which is a large automotive supplier amongst other things, and I worked on parking systems.

Thomas: It was in 2008 that two things happened. One is I finished my PhD thesis, but also Steve Jobs showed the SDK, everybody wanted to build apps, and at the time only Apple could build native apps, and I thought this is cool. I gotta build apps myself and I gotta get into that space and so I quit my job at Bosch at the height of the financial crisis, amongst all things, in late 2008.

I reconnected with a friend from university and we just became two freelance developers building apps for the German market, mostly agency work or subcontractor for larger projects. I think in 2009 and 2010 we built around 30 apps, working on building apps for mostly German customers, German enterprise customers, media and automotive, and so on.

Thomas: Got us the idea of building a platform for mobile app developers and so we together with three friends, Stefan, Andreas, and Michael, we founded a company called Hockey App which was a platform for mobile app developers. You could distribute your data bills and collect error reports, crash reports, and feedback and those kind of things.

We built that startup, the platform for our own freelance business because we had a pain point that we wanted to solve for ourselves because it was before that you would send a build over email to a project manager in Berlin or so and then the project manager would take that build and send it to the customer and explain to them how you have to drag and drop that into iTunes and connect the dock cable and all these kind of things since we made that very easier which made our own life easier.

I think those are some of the greatest startup ideas when you're using it yourself day in day out, and then improving it based on the feedback that you're getting from your own customers.

Thomas: We basically started building out the hockey business while we had the contracting business, and they were companies both about the same size and when Microsoft came in in 2014, we thought they would only buy the hockey platform and the product business and leave the contracting business alone. Given there were existing customer contracts and what have you, but in fact Microsoft bought both companies, the subsidiary, the product company, and the mothership, the contracting company, because the contracting company had a number of iOS and Android developers that were a hot commodity in 2014.

And hard to hire certainly at startup rates and so Microsoft actually took over both of those companies and a funny story is today of these 11 employees, 7, including myself, work for GitHub and so different paths they all got to Microsoft and then from Microsoft into GitHub.

Coming from a small company of our size based in Germany in Stuttgart, Germany, southwest Germany, moving halfway around the world. I moved with my wife and back then two very young kids to Seattle. That alone was a big change and looking back 10 years later and we moved in early 2015, it feels all like a blur, like things moved so fast and sometimes I don't even realize how we did all that.

Thomas: I don't think I've seen anything more exciting and changing how we think about software development in my 30 plus year career as a software developer. When I started coding in the early 1990s, there wasn't even the internet or I certainly had no internet access, and so I had to figure it out all by myself with books, with magazines, going to computer club in the community center kind of hoping that somebody will be there.

If we fast forward to where we are now is that it's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into copilot or Chat GPT or similar tools and it will likely provide you a basic web page or a small application, a game in Python, and so AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding.

And on the other side of the spectrum, it makes developers so much more productive. Most developers that work on a project have way too much work to do. They have long backlogs of their own ideas of customer feedback, things that they're hearing from their managers or from the market or seeing competitors and so almost any software project that has a certain age has way too much work on the innovation side.

Thomas: The role of GitHub in the first let's say 5 years of the age of AI, given that we started working on GitHub Copilot in June 2020, right after GPT 3 was first shown to the world, is that we want to be on the forefront of AI code generation. We want to provide tools to developer to be more productive and more happy than writing code because the reality is the dream I think for most developers that start their journey as a programmer is that they have an idea in their head and they're trying to find a way how they can get the fastest from that idea to an app or web page or service.

The challenge is not that developers don't have enough ideas. The challenge is that you take that big idea and you have to break it down into small building blocks and as you're working on the first block or the first module or the first class microservice, whatever it is, you're realizing that this idea that you have is so much more complex to implement than you thought.

And so from what became a weekend project, it becomes a month-long or sometimes year-long project and many apps that I wrote as a teenager and I know many of my friends and my employees would never get anywhere because you ultimately realize it's much more complex than you thought and it's not worth spending the time on it.

Thomas: I first of all, I strongly believe that every kid, every child should learn coding and we should actually teach them coding in school in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and whatnot. Those are all fundamental skills. Coding is one such skill and it just has taken us too long to actually realize that because software is everywhere.

Hardware is also everywhere. We carry both software and hardware with us through our day and in fact our day to day is dominated by software already. You can't really live your life, travel, wake up in the morning without software anymore, and I think as humans it is crucial to not only be in read only mode but also be able to create things ourselves or at least understand how creation is done on these devices.

That doesn't mean that every 18, 19 year old when they leave high school become a software developer in the same way that not every kid that learns physics or chemistry in school becomes a physicist, right? Just because you learn those fundamental skills doesn't mean that you decide for yourself that that's the career path to take.

Thomas: So that's number 1, you gotta learn coding. I think number 2 is you gotta use AI to do that and whether it's here in Korea or in Germany, most kids and in fact most people don't speak fluent English, which is the primary language of software development, and so it democratizes access to technology and that's true for many other things in the world and so having an agent available that answers you any question but also lets you realize your dream of building your dream is incredibly exciting.

And then the third thing for anyone who is already a software developer or wants to develop their craft is you gotta keep rehearsing, you gotta keep training. You gotta keep learning. There's, you're never done with learning. If I look back 30 years of what development looked like back then and what it looks like now, I would have been very behind if I hadn't constantly read blog posts, literature, and tried out things myself.

So I think those are as crucial as they were in the 90s, they're still crucial in 2025. You just have so much more access to information to become top of the field.