GitHub Copilot started the AI coding market. Today, barely a serious developer touches it.
Not even a vibe coder like me: we mostly live in Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.
These players are at war to own the coding agent, maybe the biggest AI market there is.
Luis Bitencourt runs GitHub Copilot. So I asked him straight up: is Copilot losing the race?
His answer:
Everyone’s fighting on two layers: the harness and the model. Luis thinks neither is winnable.
No model has stayed on top more than three months. And the harness, in his words, has “no huge secret sauce” long term.
What doesn’t move is the platform underneath. Every one of those tools runs on GitHub.
So instead of locking developers into GitHub’s own agents, they let Claude and Codex now run as agents next to Copilot.
Both harness and model are replaceable. Luis is betting the place where humans and agents come together to ship software is much harder to move.
If you’re building anything on top of AI right now, that’s the reframe: you might be fighting for the layer that resets every 3 months, not the one that lasts.
I lived a mini version of this: my podcast team moved all our work to a GitHub repo this year. I resisted it, tried to make it work in Notion, and I couldn’t.
Where he sees the next battle field of agents:
“The same way that you think of PRs, you think of GitHub. Can we get to a point where you think of sessions, you think of GitHub?”
[YouTube] → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcast]
Also in this episode:
[16:20] What Rappi and Loft, two messy physical-world businesses, taught him about humans in the loop
[28:45] Why coding agents are just the beginning: code review, SRE, debugging
[38:25] Why Microsoft’s distribution buys a head start of months now, not years
