Thomas Dohmke ran the world's biggest developer platform. He left because he believes the next one can't be built on files and folders.

Dohmke was CEO of GitHub from 2021 to 2025. In February he launched Entire, and in this episode, recorded at WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin, he lays out the whole plan: a developer platform for the era where agents write the code, humans own the intent, and the most valuable artifact in software is no longer the file. It's the session.

## About this episode

Every developer platform since SourceForge has been built around the same primitive: files and folders in a repository. Dohmke's argument is that this primitive just expired. When agents write the code, nobody cares what the folders are called. What matters is the prompt, the decisions, the reasoning. So Entire stores agent session logs in the repo, versioned together with the commits they produced. Entire Blame shows the prompts behind a line of code, Entire Why shows the reasoning path. In his framing: GitHub stores the what, Entire stores the why.

That why is the expensive part of software. It usually lives in the head of a coworker, or of the developer who retired five years ago and left behind code nobody dares to touch.

> "The challenge often is not how good of a developer you are, but how quickly you can understand why the code base is the way it is."

Below the semantic layer sits new infrastructure: the distributed Git network Entire announced in Berlin, with regional mirrors in the US, Europe, and Australia, built so agents can clone and push at a frequency no centralized system allows. And around it, the honest founder answers: why this needed a new company instead of a GitHub feature, what the "reborn on Copilot" backlash taught him about changing products at scale, and a string of keynote demo failures that ended this year with an expired GitHub token on stage.

## Key takeaways

- Files and folders are the wrong primitive for the agent era. Session logs, prompts, and intent are the artifacts worth versioning, and they belong in the repo next to the code.

- Onboarding is a why problem. The hard part of joining a codebase is not skill, it's archaeology. Storing the reasoning with the commits turns tribal knowledge into project knowledge.

- The central knowledge dump keeps failing. Feeding everything into one vector database works until a new team, tool, or acquisition brings data the index doesn't have. Better: give the agent the same access the human has and fetch at the point of decision.

- The 80% prediction was right, just early. Dohmke predicted in 2022 that AI would write 80% of code within five years. It took three, and agent-native developers now type closer to 1% of theirs.

- Not everything needs to ship. Your notebook scribbles never get published. Software can work the same way: build it, learn from it, let it stay private.

## About the guest

Thomas Dohmke is the co-founder and CEO of Entire, which came out of stealth in February 2026 with a $60 million seed round. He was the CEO of GitHub from 2021 to 2025 and led the launch and scaling of GitHub Copilot. Born in Berlin, he started coding on an East German Robotron computer and a Commodore 64, studied computer engineering at TU Berlin, worked at Mercedes-Benz and Bosch, and founded two startups, selling HockeyApp to Microsoft. Find him on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom/).

## Resources mentioned

- [Thomas Dohmke on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom/)

- [Entire](https://entire.io)

- [Entire CLI on GitHub](https://github.com/entireio/cli), open source

- [Entire's Discord](https://discord.gg/jZJs3Tue4S)

- [Entire on X](https://x.com/entirehq)

- [qmd](https://github.com/tobi/qmd), Tobi Lütke's local search engine for Markdown knowledge bases

- [GBrain](https://github.com/garrytan/gbrain), Garry Tan's agent memory project

- [Linus Torvalds on Git, Google Tech Talk 2007](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8)

- [WeAreDevelopers World Congress](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress)

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