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Journalism of Courage
With 21.9 million developers, India now ranks second only to the US, but leads globally in open-source contributions, AI repositories, and GitHub Education users on the Microsoft-owned platform, underscoring the crucial role Indian developers play in the open-source community and the global software industry.
In fact, India has become the world’s fastest-growing developer community on GitHub, adding 5.2 million new developers in the past year, a 31 per cent growth rate.
“With so much of the support for global enterprises coming out of India, it’s a reflection of the country’s quality. It shows that major businesses, from a leading US bank to a major Japanese manufacturer, wouldn’t work with a development organisation that lacks strong skills, innovation, and creativity. I think that’s why India has become such a melting pot,” said Sharryn Napier, Vice President, Asia Pacific, GitHub, the popular coding platform where developers share and collaborate on projects.
“India has always exported technology and software. I think having that as a foundational piece, along with the growth of agentic AI, has really pushed the market into overdrive,” Napier told indianexpress.com in an interview at Universe 2025 in San Francisco.
“I think until you actually visit, you don’t realise the true potential of the market. What became really obvious to me was that while the domestic scale was enormous, the impact globally was phenomenal. So, the work that happens in India has a worldwide impact. I often describe it as a ripple effect across the globe, which is why the potential of that market is so enormous,” she said.
AI tools from Microsoft and other major tech companies and AI labs are helping write code, placing software engineers and developers at the centre of the change. That sentiment among software developers is increasingly polarised — either overwhelmingly positive or profoundly negative — as they stand at the forefront of adopting AI agents and programmes designed to automate and expedite tasks.
The rapid adoption of AI has also sparked warnings that it could soon automate millions of jobs, with software developers often singled out as prime targets.
“Software development is about to go through that next, or rather, that third wave, and that’s where all these agents are becoming super important for developers trying to get their work done,” she said. “Everyone is grappling with agentic AI and figuring out how to work with it. I think we are all on this learning journey together.
“My advice to young developers is to embrace authentication and skill up, because as organisations go through these transformations, everyone is learning together. It’s really a complete transformation of the entire industry. And if young developers can build the right skills and enter the workforce with that mindset, they will be very well positioned for the future,” Napier said about navigating the changes in the age of AI-assisted software development.
But a major shift that Napier highlighted is how AI is lowering the entry barrier for anyone to code and get into software development, especially in India, which has a massive young population.
“When you start as a coder, you typically have to learn English first to be able to code, because coding is in English. When we released Copilot, one of the interesting things we saw was that the barrier for people who didn’t have English as their first language, whether it’s Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Bahasa, or Hindi, was lowered, as they can now create code in natural language. With the sheer size of India’s population, the barrier to entry into software development has dropped, which provides a fantastic opportunity for people to start coding earlier. The limitation of needing to learn English is now removed,” she said.
Napier added that more and more non-coders and people from non-engineering backgrounds are taking up software development with the help of AI.
Vibecoding, a term popularised by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, is a shorthand for how AI tools allow even non-technical people and hobbyists to build fully functioning apps and websites just by typing prompts into a text box. They don’t need to know how to code to vibecode — just having an idea, a little patience, and creativity is usually enough.
However, Napier also emphasised that AI is an evolution in software development, far from being designed to make coders extinct. “When you bring someone on as a junior developer and give them a codebase, Copilot can quickly help them understand it. This allows them to onboard faster, become productive much sooner, and get familiar with the codebase quickly, which helps them integrate into the team more efficiently,” she said.
“For senior engineers, this has allowed them to delegate more mundane tasks or work that doesn’t fully leverage their creative and innovative skills to agents. They can then orchestrate these agents to handle the work, freeing themselves to focus on the higher-level, creative aspects of development – the parts that originally got them excited about software development. In this way, developers can concentrate on the work they love and delegate the tasks they don’t to coding agents.”
The impact of AI tools on software development is already being felt, noted Napier. “There was some reticence, but that’s sort of a thing of the past. I think there’s now more excitement around what can be done with agents and what work can actually be delegated to them, and how you orchestrate that. So, I would say there’s more excitement than concern. We have moved well past that stage and are very much focused on the possibilities now.”
Napier also noted that more companies are using AI to write code, a trend that is now industry-wide. Earlier, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said as much as 30 per cent of the company’s code is now written by AI, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that more than 25 per cent of new code at teh company is generated by AI.
“There’s more code being written by AI generally, and I have had a customer mention that code quality has improved quite significantly,” she added.
“GitHub exists as a platform not just for collaboration, but for developers to build without limits, and those limits extend beyond borders. I think the open-source community offers an opportunity not only for those in enterprise development or working for international companies, but for anyone to collaborate globally with that community. It’s collaboration without limits,” Napier said in response to a question about how a platform like GitHub exposes Indian developers to a global developer base, helps bridge the skill gap, and encourages them to create world-class apps and software programmes.
For Microsoft, which acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, the developer platform where coders and programmers discuss and learn computer science techniques is an important part of the company’s strategy, especially now as the tech giant aims to make AI a more natural part of the software development process.
GitHub Copilot, an AI coding tool announced earlier this year, has more than 26 million users. It is among the most popular AI coding tools today and is used by 90 per cent of the Fortune 100 companies.
However, AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot still have relatively small user bases compared to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, which attract hundreds of millions of users every month. The difference is that those are general AI chatbots vs GitHub Copilot, which is increasingly used by software engineers. GitHub generates over $2 billion in annualised revenue.
Napier said that GitHub continues to invest heavily in India and has tripled its team size there. GitHub currently operates as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI group.
