Thomas Dohmke’s departure as GitHub CEO marks the end of an era that was always destined to be short-lived. With Microsoft eliminating the CEO position entirely and further folding GitHub into its CoreAI team, we’re witnessing the final absorption of what was once the internet’s most important code repository. This isn’t shocking news. It’s the predictable conclusion to a story that began the moment Microsoft bought the company back in 2018.

When Microsoft acquired GitHub seven years ago, they made all the right promises. GitHub would remain independent, they said. It would keep its developer-first culture and open platform approach. Nat Friedman would run things as CEO, and the community could trust that nothing fundamental would change. These assurances felt hollow at the time, and they are even more absurd now.

The pattern here is depressingly familiar if you’ve watched Microsoft operate over the years. They buy something beloved by developers, promise to preserve its independence, maintain that facade for a while, and then slowly but methodically integrate it into their larger corporate machine. LinkedIn followed this exact playbook after Microsoft bought it in 2016. The platform maintained some semblance of independence at first, but gradually became just another Microsoft property.

GitHub’s trajectory has been even more transparent. When Nat Friedman stepped down in 2021, Dohmke took over but started reporting to Julia Liuson in Microsoft’s developer division instead of maintaining direct independence. Earlier this year, that reporting structure shifted again when Liuson began answering to Jay Parikh’s newly formed CoreAI team. Each reorganization brought GitHub deeper into Microsoft’s corporate structure, making the most recent news feel less like a surprise and more like the inevitable final step.

The timing tells us everything we need to know about Microsoft’s priorities. GitHub is being absorbed at the exact moment when AI-powered coding tools have become the battleground in tech. They’re gaining more direct control over the platform that hosts most of the world’s open-source code at precisely the moment when that code has become crucial training data for AI models. The company that controls GitHub controls access to the raw material that will power the next generation of coding assistants. To say it’s a gold mine for Microsoft is an understatement.

Parikh, in sharing his vision of an “agent factory” makes Microsoft’s intentions crystal clear. This isn’t about preserving GitHub’s community-focused culture or maintaining its role as a neutral platform for developers. It’s about weaponizing the largest collection of code in the world to build AI tools that can compete with upstarts like Cursor and Claude’s coding capabilities. GitHub Copilot was just the beginning. Now the entire platform becomes a cog in Microsoft’s AI ambitions.

The saddest part isn’t that Microsoft is doing this, but that so many people seem caught off guard. This company has a decades-long history of acquiring beloved developer tools and slowly but surely bending them to serve corporate interests rather than community needs. Remember when they bought Xamarin and promised it would remain a vibrant cross-platform development solution? That technology has been relegated to a shadow of its former self, with Visual Studio for Mac getting killed off and the mobile development story becoming increasingly confusing.

The broader developer community understood the risks from day one. When Microsoft announced the GitHub acquisition, developers immediately started talking about alternatives. GitLab saw a massive surge in interest, and platforms like SourceForge experienced renewed attention as people looked for escape routes. The smart money moved their most important projects elsewhere or at least set up mirrors on other platforms.

Those early concerns now look prophetic. GitHub under Microsoft started pushing enterprise features, tightening integration with Azure, and making decisions that clearly prioritized corporate customers over the open-source community that built the platform’s reputation. The introduction of GitHub Copilot, trained on code that developers uploaded with the expectation of open collaboration, marked a turning point where GitHub began monetizing community contributions in ways that many found ethically questionable.

Dohmke’s departure to “become a startup founder again” reads like a polite way of saying he couldn’t stomach what GitHub was becoming under Microsoft’s increasingly direct control. After nearly four years of walking the tightrope between community expectations and corporate demands, he’s chosen to jump ship just as that balancing act becomes impossible. The fact that Microsoft isn’t even bothering to replace him tells us everything about how they view GitHub’s future role.

The further integration into CoreAI also signals the end of any pretense that GitHub serves the broader developer community first and Microsoft’s business interests second. When your code repository becomes part of an “AI platform and tools” division, you’re no longer primarily a hosting service. You’re a data collection and product development arm of one of the world’s most successful technology companies.

This matters because GitHub isn’t just another software tool. It’s critical infrastructure for the global software development community. When Microsoft controls both the platform where code lives and the AI tools that increasingly write that code, they gain an unprecedented level of influence over how software gets built. That kind of vertical integration might make business sense for Microsoft, but it’s terrible news for anyone who believes in a diverse, competitive, and open software development ecosystem.

The real tragedy is that this was all completely avoidable. GitHub could have remained independent, grown sustainably, and continued serving as a neutral platform for developers around the world. Instead, the company’s founders chose a massive payday, and now the entire global software development community has to live with the consequences of that decision.

Microsoft’s behavior here isn’t evil. It’s just predictable corporate strategy. They identified a valuable asset, made promises they never intended to keep, and are now extracting maximum value from their acquisition in ways that serve their broader business goals. The problem isn’t that Microsoft is acting like Microsoft; the problem is that too many people chose to believe they wouldn’t when it came to GitHub.

For developers who still keep their primary repositories on GitHub, this latest change should serve as a final wake-up call. The platform you’ve built your workflow around is no longer a service provider focused on your needs. It’s a strategic asset in Microsoft’s AI wars. Whether that matters to you depends on how much you trust Microsoft to balance their corporate interests with the needs of the broader developer community. Based on their track record, any further trust in the company seems increasingly misplaced.