As AI agents reshape software creation, GitHub believes India is entering a new phase where problem solving matters more than coding itself.
For years, software development was largely defined by those who could write code. Developers were expected to master programming languages, understand frameworks, and manually build applications line by line. But according to Karan M V, Global Developer Relations Manager, GitHub, that definition is rapidly dissolving.
India’s next software wave, he believes, will not be led only by traditional programmers. It will increasingly come from people who may never formally identify themselves as developers at all.
GitHub is now pushing what Karan describes as the “ABCD” notion, short for “Anybody Can Develop.” During an exclusive interaction, he described this as a new democratized era of software creation powered by AI and agent-driven development.
According to him, the core shift lies in how software is produced. AI agents are increasingly capable of executing core development functions such as frontend design, backend implementation, database management, testing, and debugging. This is allowing individuals from non-software backgrounds to build applications with minimal coding intervention, fundamentally lowering the entry barrier to software creation.
Karan said this is also reshaping the role of developers themselves. Instead of manually writing code line by line, developers are increasingly becoming orchestrators of multiple AI agents, focusing on system design, problem-solving, scalability, and user experience. “The role of a developer itself is changing,” he said. “A developer is someone who solves a problem with the help of technology and software.” GitHub believes this shift marks a move away from execution heavy roles toward judgment-driven engineering.
He added that the impact is already visible across India’s expanding developer ecosystem. When he joined GitHub nearly six years ago, India had around four million developers on the platform. Today, that number has crossed 27 million. But the more significant change, according to GitHub, is not scale but accessibility, as AI is collapsing the gap between ideas and execution and enabling a wider set of individuals to participate in software creation.
GitHub also sees this reflected in India’s open source and product-building ecosystem, where projects such as HyperSwitch by Juspay, ERPNext, Bruno, and the Open Healthcare Network demonstrate increasing global relevance. The company believes AI-driven development will further accelerate this transition, enabling a new generation of builders who may not even identify themselves as developers but are increasingly capable of building software at scale.
