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Just as GitHub was unlike its predecessors (e.g., SourceForge), the next dominant developer platform won't be a "better GitHub." It will solve a new set of problems created by AI-driven workflows, likely revolving around specification and review in a world where code is generated.

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The creative process with AI involves exploring many options, most of which are imperfect. This makes the collaboration a version control problem. Users need tools to easily branch, suggest, review, and merge ideas, much like developers use Git, to manage the AI's prolific but often flawed output.

Snyk founder's new venture, TESOL, posits that AI will make code disposable. Instead of code being the source of truth, a durable, versioned 'spec' document defining requirements will become the core asset. AI agents will generate the implementation, fundamentally changing software development.

Tools like Git were designed for human-paced development. AI agents, which can make thousands of changes in parallel, require a new infrastructure layer—real-time repositories, coordination mechanisms, and shared memory—that traditional systems cannot support.

The future value in code management isn't just storing files; it's owning the layer that understands how code connects across services. This operational domain is where AI agents function, signaling an inevitable category shift that companies like OpenAI are already exploring internally.

Cognition's Scott Wu predicts that AI will elevate software development to a new level of abstraction. Instead of reviewing code, engineers will review and iterate on English-language specifications and product decisions. The AI agent will handle the code generation, making English the new "source of truth."

The evolution of software from human-written code to AI-driven systems requires a new platform. This platform will manage development as a "system graph" or "knowledge graph," a higher abstraction than GitHub's file-based model. OpenAI's internal tool signals this shift away from traditional source control.

Widespread adoption of AI coding tools like Cursor dramatically increases code output, shifting the primary development bottleneck from writing to reviewing. This creates a market for collaboration tools like Graphite and drives consolidation as platforms race to own the end-to-end developer loop.

The next evolution of agentic work involves massive, collaborative swarms of AIs working together. Current tools like GitHub, designed for human workflows with a single master branch, are ill-suited for this paradigm. The future will require new, agent-native platforms, possibly resembling social networks, to manage thousands of parallel experiments and collaborative branches.

As AI makes the act of writing code a commodity, the primary challenge is no longer execution but discovery. The most valuable work becomes prototyping and exploring to determine *what* should be built, increasing the strategic importance of the design function.

As AI writes most of the code, the highest-leverage human activity will shift from reviewing pull requests to reviewing the AI's research and implementation plans. Collaborating on the plan provides a narrative journey of the upcoming changes, allowing for high-level course correction before hundreds of lines of bad code are ever generated.