GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke to parents: Make your kid learn …

GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke emphasized that coding education should begin early and become a standard part of school curriculum, despite advances in AI that make software development more accessible than ever before.
"I strongly believe that every kid, every child, should learn coding," Dohmke said in a recent podcast interview with EO. "We should actually teach them coding in school, in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and what-not."
Dohmke, who has been programming since the 1990s, described the current era of AI-assisted development as the most exciting time he's witnessed in engineering. He believes AI tools are democratizing access to software creation, allowing beginners to accomplish more with less technical knowledge.

"It's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into Copilot or ChatGPT or similar tools, and it will likely write you a basic webpage, or a small application, a game in Python," he explained.
This democratization is enabling smaller teams to tackle larger projects. "You see some of the early signs of that, where very small startups — sometimes five developers and some of them actually only one developer — believe they can become million, if not billion dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them," Dohmke noted.
While some developers worry about job displacement as AI makes smaller teams more productive, Dohmke remains optimistic. In a January blog post, he acknowledged that "the anxiety is understandable," but reminded that "developers have discovered how to channel the new capabilities into entire domains of innovation that didn't exist before."
For established programmers, Dohmke advises continuous learning: "You got to keep rehearsing. You got to keep training. You got to keep learning. You're never done with learning."