Microsoft's agent platform play
What this week's GitHub news says about Microsoft's role in the AI race. Also: this week on ACCESS.
To understand how Microsoft sees its role in the AI race, look at what was announced at the company’s GitHub Universe developer conference on Tuesday in San Francisco.
The event marked a turning point for one of Microsoft’s most important but often under-analyzed assets. GitHub, which is used by more than 180 million developers, wants to be the central platform for AI coding agents. It's new Agent HQ interface lets outside coding assistants, including OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, plug into the GitHub ecosystem.
The timing is apt. If GitHub doesn’t move fast enough, Microsoft risks being left behind by a wave of agentic coding tools that are quickly redefining what software development looks like. Tools like Cursor, which coincidentally announced a major update this week, are already orchestrating entire workflows for developers rather than simply autocompleting code. While agents aren’t yet making a significant impact in other verticals, in software development, the boundary between helper and co-worker is quickly disappearing.
Jared Palmer, GitHub’s new senior vice president, joined Microsoft from Vercel just ten days before we spoke ahead of this week’s Universe conference. “GitHub is in this interesting transition phase,” he said. “It needs to evolve into the platform for not just people, but also agents.”
Palmer said the goal is to keep GitHub “the home where development happens,” no matter which AI tools developers choose. “We need to have a very arms-wide-open ecosystem,” he told me. In addition to OpenAI and Anthropic, Google, Cognition, and xAI have also committed to bringing their coding agents to Agent HQ in the coming months.
Thanks to GitHub's longtime, essential role in storing code, it has a good shot at becoming the connective layer between agents and codebases. That would mean Microsoft stays at the center of the developer universe. If it doesn’t, developers could move their work and their data elsewhere over time.
Jay Parikh oversees GitHub as Microsoft’s executive vice president of CoreAI. The longtime Facebook CTO and Atlassian board member joined Microsoft nearly a year ago and now leads a group of roughly 10,000 people. His mandate is to rethink the entire Microsoft stack for building AI applications: infrastructure, security, and the tools developers use every day.
“We need to move faster,” Parikh told me in an interview this week. “We need to build better tools, different tools. We need to have that developer ecosystem, that choice, and all the things that support this new way of building software.”
He sees GitHub’s role as essential to that plan, which explains why Microsoft folded GitHub into his CoreAI. “You really want GitHub to be that place, that toolchain, that community for developers to really unlock this innovation,” he said. “Humans are going to start spending more time in the specification and creative process and delegate the actual calories they spend to GPUs, to coding agents that generate the code.”
As GitHub COO Kyle Daigle put it to me, “A developer shouldn’t have to build up memory and context in every single tool that they’re using in this AI age. You should be able to connect to GitHub and have that context to determine how you want to work, even if you’re using that tool off GitHub’s platform.”
That bet ties directly to Microsoft’s long-running partnership with OpenAI. On the same day as GitHub Universe, CEO Satya Nadella appeared on
to discuss Microsoft’s updated partnership with OpenAI. He said that “GitHub is where that billion to ten billion happened” — a reference to how the early traction of GitHub Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s Codex, convinced him to dramatically expand Microsoft’s initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI.GitHub has always served two critical roles: it’s a massive repository of open-source code and one of the largest collaboration hubs ever built. Engineers use it not only to store and manage their code, but to find jobs and build community. Microsoft may have sparked the AI coding boom with the original GitHub Copilot, but now it has to prove it can keep up with where the industry is headed.
This week on ACCESS
On this week’s episode of the show, Ellis and I are joined by Wabi CEO Eugenia Kuyda to discuss her new startup’s upcoming launch. Wabi has been generating a lot of buzz in tech circles while it has been in invite-only beta, and Kuyda is gearing up to open it up to everyone very soon. We discuss why she’s building a platform for creating and discovering mini-apps with AI, her experience before Wabi running Replika, the state of AI companionship, raising kids in an AI-driven age, and more.
Make sure to like and subscribe everywhere you get podcasts.
Also: Ellis and I are excited to record the first ACCESS live taping at the Google Ventures AI Builders event in San Francisco on November 10th. Our guest will be Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. If you’ll be in town, work in AI, and want to attend, drop me a line.
Talking OpenAI’s restructuring
I went back on Prof G Markets with Ed Elson earlier this week to discuss OpenAI’s restructuring. I’ll summarize here: an OpenAI IPO is definitely ASAP (Reuters has more on the state of that situation), Microsoft cares more about continual IP rights to OpenAI’s tech (except for what Altman is cooking with Jony Ive) than whatever happens after AGI is reached, and it’s still weird that Sam Altman doesn’t have direct equity in OpenAI (I like “living an interesting life” too, but come on). Regarding the OpenAI Foundation nonprofit, this week’s news raised more questions than it answered.
“Manage your startup equity like a VC”
When Billy Gallagher first told me about what he is doing with Prospect, a new platform for making sense of startup equity, my eyes lit up. This is not an advertisement, and I’m not an investor; I genuinely believe this is a good idea and know that I have subscribers who may find it helpful:
When I started my career as a VC at Khosla Ventures, it was my full time job to think deeply about what a startup may be worth in the future, and how we should manage our private stock. Then I joined Rippling, where my teammates and I were paid partially in equity. We weren’t professional investors, but we had to manage our own private equity portfolios on top of our day jobs. At Rippling, we were asking the same fundamental questions I asked at Khosla, but with far less time and expertise.
I started Prospect to help startup employees earn more from their equity and build the tools I wish I’d had, from deciding when to exercise options to choosing how much to sell in a tender. Prospect puts a venture capitalist, accountant, and career coach into an employee’s pocket, working 24/7 for them to earn more from their equity.
Elsewhere
Sandbar CEO Mina Fahmi was kind enough to fly down to LA this week to demo the startup’s first product. I’m not yet allowed to say much about it, other than I found it to be one of the more compelling AI wearable demos I’ve experienced, and I expect there to be more copycats in the future.
Joanna Stern cuts through the marketing illusion surrounding 1X’s Neo humanoid. The launch video for Neo is very well done, but incredibly disingenuous when you realize a human has to control the robot remotely. I admire 1X’s bet on gathering training data in the home. At the same time, the company would have garnered more goodwill by being honest about the product in the marketing. If you pre-ordered one, I’d love to know what you plan on using it for.
This week’s Meta Reality Labs leadership shuffle suggests a greater emphasis on scaling Horizon as a true rival to Roblox and Fortnite. You don’t bring Saxs Persson in from Epic Games unless you’re serious about the space.
Will Depue is back at OpenAI and leading a small team working on an “incredibly high-risk bet that has a small, but significant, chance of leading to ASI.”
One of Cursor’s four co-founders, Arvid Lunnemark, announced that he’s leaving.
Tesla is apparently so nervous about the shareholder vote on Elon’s pay package that employees are writing open letters.
Harry McCracken interviewed Dylan Field about Figma’s first acquisition as a public company.
Matthew Ball notes that “Roblox’s quarterly engagement hours are now ~82.5% as much as Netflix’s.”
Sources hits NYC
I’ll be speaking at the NYC Media Summit on Monday as part of the indie media panel. Please say hello if you’ll be there or would like to meet up while I’m in town next week.
The Sources NYC launch party with Human Ventures is officially over capacity. It’s going to be a great group of media and tech folks. We’ll have tequila, music, food, poker, and hopefully some merch.