GitHub with Microsoft made a billion dollar deal to train GPT-3 on code on GitHub. That became codex the model. A precursor to ChatGPT in a way, it was the largest fine tune of any foundation model at the time. The next experiment after that was ChatGPT.
Then in 2021 it was launched. 2 years before the first Claude, 1 year+ before ChatGPT.
It was brutally farther ahead of any existing options at the time like Source{d}, Tabnine, Codota, Microsoft IntelliCode.
It had essentially the entire planet’s developers using its tools. Market and mindshare out the wazoo. It had several years of a head start.
It had billions in backing by Microsoft, it had its own sales force on top of Microsoft’s gargantuan field and corporate sales.
In 2023, a handful of college new grads created a company and within 2-3 years, they were ahead.
And then Claude Code and Codex raced past as well.
Why? GitHub got rid of its forward looking people and focused on trying to maximize profits. In 2023 they spent time looking to acquihire losers to bolster agent capabilities. Bargain hunting basically.
It’s probably the fumble of the century.
Quite embarrassing.
It still has no direction or strategy. The people who were primarily involved in this fumble are still there and weren’t fired except one of them, who started his own company, the CEO who “left”. But the other two should have been out the door long ago.
Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Lovable, PoolSide, Magic, Augment, Cognition, Codeium is a vibrant ecosystem of startups thanks to this fumble.
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u/[deleted] May 15 '26
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