GitHub is ripe for disruption

GitHub is ubiquitous. It feels like it has always been there and I couldn’t imagine a world without it. You might use different LLMs, IDEs, and programming languages, but everyone uses GitHub.

This isn’t to say a better version couldn’t exist and now seems like the perfect moment to make it happen. Outages seem to happen every week, it is in a decreasingly important spot at Microsoft, and it simply hasn’t really changed (probably a good thing).

Here are some features GitHub doesn’t have that could form the basis of a disruptive competitor:

• Live collaboration. GitHub is a Sketch-era app. There is a Figma equivalent waiting to be built. Planning, issues, and reviews could all be rebuilt to use live collaboration. For example, why can’t I thread comments on PRs, only code comments? Why can my review overlap with someone else’s and I get no warning?
• Tailored review interfaces. GitHub was built for software engineers but there’s a lot more roles who rely on it now like me (a technical marketer). Review interfaces tailored to the type of content being reviewed. For example, reviewing markdown sucks and a change to a website almost always involves deploying a preview and tabbing back and forth between it and the PR. I’m sure infra or ML engineers could come up with their own requirements too.
• AI coding. It’s sort of forgotten that Copilot was a GitHub product. Although I’m sure it’s still used a lot, it doesn’t feel like a core part of GitHub. It’s also not on the cutting edge anymore (Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, etc.). There’s no AI interface in GitHub. Where is the issue summarization, chat with your codebase, and code generation?
• Native AI code reviews. Although they are the biggest new innovation in GitHub, it feels like AI code review tools like Greptile are bolted on rather than natively supported. AI code reviewers are limited in their functionality in GitHub (only read code and comment) and largely run outside GitHub.

GitHub has been very content with its spot in the ecosystem. It has lightly reached into other areas like code editors, package management, AI code generation, and more, but not seriously. For example, GitHub owns npm but it feels like there is much more innovation in developer tooling elsewhere (see uv, pyx, pnpm, Turbo, and more).

GitHub Actions is hugely successful, with a market share apparently over 50% in CI, but the company as a whole remains a big “what if” (they built 5 more similarly successful products).

Simply, the disruption caused by LLMs, code generation, and the amount of capital flowing into AI presents a huge opportunity to disrupt GitHub and become a critical (and valuable) tool in software development.