A (GitHub) Universe of Possibilities

ByAaron Beals

Two weeks ago, I had the chance to hang out with the Octocat on the San Francisco waterfront. 

What it was

GitHub Universe was a two-day conference, with an extra day (day 0) beforehand for certain folks: partners, startups, open source community, and select customers (mostly customer advisory board members). Day 0 was a few hundred people, and the main conference was around 3,500. 

Conferences are a crapshoot. You usually get out of them what you put in, but sometimes they’re still not worth the opportunity cost. Thankfully, GitHub Universe was fantastic. 

What I learned

Conference recaps can either be exhaustive (and exhausting) or very “you had to be there.” I’m striving for a more minimal “here’s a few highlights.” 

  • Not-so-secret agent, man. The agentic approach to AI was everywhere. The demos I saw for GitHub Copilot and Copilot Workspace all used the approach of talking to multiple agents (e.g. Atlassian, GitHub Copilot) in one chat thread, using each for what they’re best at. This follows the trend we’re seeing elsewhere toward specialized AI-powered agents over the traditional LLM+RAG approach.
  • Empowering product and prototyping. From Copilot Workspace to GitHub Spark (do we really need another Spark?) I saw GitHub pushing the limits and inviting more people into the traditional development process. Yes, one way to view this is “OMG they’re replacing developers!” but that’s wrong—they are allowing for more rapid prototyping and iteration on an idea. You still need engineering chops to get this all into a production-ready, secure state. But not all development is destined for production—sometimes we need to build rapid prototypes to learn. And tools like these welcome others, like product management and designers, into the software development tent.
  • GitHub for Startups. I attended Day 0, which I can’t talk about (under NDA and all that), but I had a chance to meet the small team behind GitHub for Startups. If you’re a startup, definitely get connected with these folks—they’re wonderful. Supportive, sharp, energetic, helpful… everything you need. I can’t say enough good things about them.
  • Focus on developers, not engineering leaders. Naturally, tools like Copilot and GitHub Advanced Security are being built with developers in mind. GitHub’s trying to get to 1B developers, so they’re going to build tools that help individual developers in their day-to-day. However, they’re creating an ecosystem for development teams, and Flux, with our focus on engineering leaders and their teams, fits in well.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we at Flux are building an AI agent to help engineering leaders and their teams, especially if you’ve got your code in GitHub, get in touch!

Aaron Beals is the CTO of Flux, where he assembles high-performing engineering teams and translates business needs into innovative solutions. At Flux, Aaron combines his experience building scalable, secure enterprise-class SaaS apps with cutting-edge AI models to deliver new products to support engineering managers like himself.

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