GitHub’s CEO Drops a Bombshell: “Either You Embrace AI, or Get Out of This Career”

When warnings like these come from a CEO of a major tech company, you take notes. We’re talking about GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke criticizing developers who aren’t embracing AI, yet. If that ‘yet’ applies to you too, then you need to understand Thomas Dohmke’s standpoints, or you could be in trouble. We recently covered news about Microsoft laying off over 15,000 employees (until August 2025) after its hefty investment in AI, and now there’s another caution adding fuel to the fire.

He posted a detailed opinion about AI and developers on his ‘X’ account on 4 August. According to Thomas Dohmke, developers shouldn’t be worried; instead, stay optimistic. But how exactly? Here’s more on what he said and what it could mean for you.

Reasons For Warning Developers On Embracing AI – GitHub CEO

Thomas Dohmke’s warning came after a field study involving 22 developers. The interview provided insights into how they approached and integrated AI. He shared that the research happened in 4 stages.

1. Skeptic – Where the developers simply weren’t that interested or just thought “Pretty cool, but gimmicky.”
2. Explorer – Where developers were put to work “Using AI for debugging, boilerplate, and snippets,” soon they came to learn the AI’s limitations.
3. Collaborator – Where the developers turned into active co-creators with AI.
4. Strategist – Where the developers became confident being on one page with AI. And so they started “Treating AI as a powerful partner for feature development, complex tasks, and large-scale refactorings.”

The study uncovered striking opinions among these 22 developers after the 4th stage. Half believed AI would write 90% of the code within the next 5 years, while the other half agreed it would happen in 2 years.

In fact, one of the developers also said, “Either you have to embrace the AI, or you get out of your career.”

If you are someone still sticking with traditional coding and spending long hours, waiting for a sign, then this is pretty much it.

News Skills Developers Need Right Now – Thomas Dohmke

He wrote, “The future belongs to developers who can model systems, anticipate edge cases, and translate ambiguity into structure—skills that AI can’t automate.” And pointed 7 key skills to stand out:

1. AI fluency – Learning and understanding AI tools and their capabilities, limitations.
2. Delegation and agent orchestration – Critical communications skills are a must.
3. Human-AI collaboration – Just learning and understanding AI won’t do, but hands-on execution does.
4. Fundamentals – Deep programming skills are a must and non-negotiable.
5. Verification and quality control – To err is human and to err is AI, so verifying the code is quintessential.
6. Product understanding – Understanding users’ needs goes beyond code, and AI is still naive for that.
7. Architecture and systems design – AI is good for handling the low-level coding, the overall system architecture understanding rests in your hands.

Final thoughts

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the software job market is expected to grow by 18% over the next decade. Meaning developers are still needed. In his opinion, the AI era is about the skill shift, not coding less or replacing developers. What do you think? Are you still skeptical or slightly optimistic?