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Former GitHub CEO launches rival platform built for AI coding agents

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Entire CEO Thomas Dohmke, speaking last month at Madrona’s IA40 Summit in Seattle, says AI agents have made code review a much bigger bottleneck for developers. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

A startup led by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke is introducing its own platform for storing, reviewing and shipping code written by AI agents, competing with the company he used to run.

The startup, Entire , on Monday unveiled what it calls a Git forge — a service for hosting code, reviewing changes and running builds, the core of what GitHub does — designed for teams whose AI agents write code faster than people can review it. The company is pitching it as an alternative to GitHub.

The news comes two days before GitHub’s annual Universe conference in San Francisco. Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018 and has since folded it into its CoreAI division.

The biggest change is Trails, Entire’s replacement for the pull request, the standard way developers propose and review code changes. The pull request “has become an audit log that only the agent reads,” Dohmke wrote in a blog post Monday. Instead of reading through every changed line, developers see a dashboard of scores from AI agents evaluating the code on each update.

According to Entire, multiple AI agents check the quality of each change, so developers can merge code without reading every line. Teams can also require a person’s sign-off, or passing automated tests, before any code goes in, the company said.

The launch comes as GitHub strains under the load from AI agents. The platform has had several significant outages in recent months, including one in August that lasted nearly eight hours. GitHub is moving from its own data centers to Microsoft’s Azure cloud to add capacity. GitHub said developers and agents made 7.38 billion commits, or saved code changes, on the platform in September alone.

Dohmke, who is based in Bellevue, Wash., left GitHub last year after nearly four years as CEO. Entire says it now has 50 employees. The company is fully remote.

Entire isn’t alone in rethinking code hosting for AI agents. AI coding company Cursor launched its own code-hosting service , Origin, in August. And Anthropic recently described building its own source control system as the number of code changes it merged each day grew from about 2,500 in May to more than 30,000 in September.

With the latest updates, Entire now lets developers host private code repositories directly on its service in the U.S., Europe, India and Australia, and says its service can handle up to 89 times as many code pushes per second as GitHub, based on its own benchmarks. It’s partnering with Buildkite and Depot on build and test pipelines, giving developers a way to move off GitHub Actions. Public repositories and self-hosting are on the roadmap.

Entire is also adding what it calls Continuous Memory, which lets AI agents search past coding sessions for the context behind earlier changes. The company says one part of it, a map of the codebase, cut token use by up to 71% in its testing.

That goes beyond the startup’s July launch , which mirrored existing GitHub repositories on a faster network rather than replacing them. Developers can still mirror from GitHub, or now move their code to Entire instead.

Microsoft’s venture arm M12 was among the backers of Entire’s $60 million seed round in February. Felicis led the round, with participation from Seattle-based Madrona and Basis Set Ventures, along with individual investors such as Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.

“Code review was always a bottleneck,” Dohmke said at a Madrona event last month. “I’ve never worked in a software company where I didn’t wait for somebody else to review my pull request, and you have to ping people in Slack three times. And there was this one guy that had to review everything because he knew what to look for. And now that bottleneck is 10 times bigger.”

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