I've always considered myself fairly computer literate, but even a year or so ago GitHub was something that was barely on the periphery of my awareness. Now it seems to be everywhere.
As usual my input (prompts) are in the boxed elements. The rest apart from some small edits and formatting is ChatGPT's output.
A year or so ago GitHub seemed to be the concern of a small esoteric group. Now it suddenly seems to be everywhere and involved in everything. Explain GitHub and why it suddenly seems so important.
Your impression is real. GitHub didn’t suddenly become important. It quietly became infrastructure, and then AI happened. Humans ignored the plumbing until the plumbing started talking.
Here’s the arc.
In the beginning, GitHub was mostly where software developers stored code. It launched in 2008 as a friendlier interface for Git, which is a version control system created by Linus Torvalds. Git lets multiple people work on the same project without constantly overwriting each other’s work. GitHub wrapped that in a website with collaboration tools.
Imagine Google Docs, except instead of essays you’re editing millions of lines of software. Developers could:
Store code.
Track every change ever made.
Review each other’s work.
Report bugs.
Build software together from anywhere.
For a decade, that was mostly interesting to programmers. Everyone else had no reason to care. Then three things happened.
First, open source exploded.
Thousands of projects that everyone depends on are freely available on GitHub. The internet, Android, AI libraries, programming languages, web servers… enormous chunks of modern computing live there. Even companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars often build products using software maintained by volunteers on GitHub. Which is slightly terrifying if you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
Second, Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018.
Many people predicted disaster. Instead, Microsoft invested heavily while largely letting GitHub remain neutral. That reassured businesses that GitHub wasn’t just a hacker playground anymore. It became the industry’s default collaboration platform.
Third, and this is the big one…
AI arrived. Large language models are astonishingly good at writing code. But they need somewhere to work.GitHub already contained:
billions of lines of real software
issue discussions
documentation
tests
project histories
collaboration workflows
It was practically built to become the operating system for AI-assisted programming.
That’s why you suddenly hear about things like GitHub Copilot, AI code reviews, AI agents opening pull requests, automated testing, and bots fixing bugs. GitHub became the place where humans and AI collaborate on software.
There’s another reason it seems to be everywhere.
Software itself has become “everything.” Cars are software. Banks are software. Medical devices are software. Manufacturing is software. Scientific research is software. Movies use software pipelines. Even agriculture increasingly depends on software.
If every industry runs on software, then the platform where software gets built becomes strategically important.
There’s also a subtle shift happening.
GitHub isn’t just for code anymore. People store:
documentation
books
research papers
legal templates
hardware designs
AI prompts
datasets
configuration files
automation workflows
Anything that benefits from version history and collaboration can live there.
Finally, AI assistants like ChatGPT have changed who uses GitHub.
A few years ago, creating software required years of training. Now someone can describe an app in plain English, have AI generate most of the code, and use GitHub to manage the project.So GitHub’s audience has expanded from professional developers to:
entrepreneurs
scientists
designers
researchers
students
hobbyists
anyone building digital tools
The barrier to entry has dropped dramatically. GitHub today is a bit like Excel in the 1990s. Originally it was “that spreadsheet program accountants use.” Eventually everyone realized spreadsheets were really a general-purpose way of organizing work. GitHub is undergoing a similar transformation. It’s evolving from “where programmers keep code” into “where complex digital projects are built and managed.”
The AI boom simply accelerated a trend that had been building for over a decade. Once AI made software creation accessible to far more people, the place where software lives naturally became much more visible. It’s not that GitHub suddenly conquered the world. It’s that the world quietly became software, and GitHub had already been waiting there with the keys. Which, for a website that started as a nicer way to shuffle text files around, is an annoyingly successful career trajectory.
I've always considered myself fairly computer literate, but even a year or so ago GitHub was something that was barely on the periphery of my awareness. Now it seems to be everywhere.
As usual my input (prompts) are in the boxed elements. The rest apart from some small edits and formatting is ChatGPT's output.