GitHub has rebuilt the engine behind its Copilot tools, moving it from one programming language to another. The rewrite came to more than 800,000 lines of code across 128 batches of changes, and GitHub says AI agents wrote most of it, with one developer leading work that would previously have taken a team a year or two.
For your website, this changes nothing. The engine in question sits underneath developer tools, not underneath small business websites. Your booking form, your contact page and your hosting are untouched by it. If someone tells you your site needs updating because of this, they are selling you something.
What it is worth paying attention to is the shift it points at. The claim being made here is that a very large, very technical piece of work was done far faster than normal because AI wrote the bulk of it. If that holds up outside GitHub's own walls, the cost and timeline of building software starts moving. Over the next year or two you may find that quotes for custom work come in lower, or that things you were told were "not worth it for a site your size" become worth it.
There is a flip side. Fast code is not automatically good code. GitHub's own account mentions regressions, meaning things that broke and had to be fixed, though they caught them because they shipped in small pieces rather than one big switchover. That is the actual lesson worth carrying across to your own work. Whoever builds or maintains your site, whether they use AI or not, should be releasing changes in small steps you can check, not disappearing for six weeks and returning with a whole new site.
It is also a reminder that a rewrite is a serious thing. GitHub had a real reason: one shared engine feeding many products, so one fix helps everywhere. "We would rather use a newer tool" is not that reason.
What to do: Nothing today. Next time you speak to whoever looks after your site, ask two things. How do they release changes, in small steps or big drops? And if they use AI to write code, who reads it before it goes live?
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