The engineer who helped make GitHub Copilot a global force is building its open alternative from Christchurch

For millions of software developers, GitHub Copilot was the moment artificial intelligence stopped being an abstract promise and became a practical colleague.

Suddenly, AI could sit in the coding environment, suggest the next line, explain unfamiliar code and help turn an idea into working software. It changed expectations of what a developer tool could do, and opened the door to a new generation of AI coding agents.

Igor Costa was there as that shift gathered pace.

The Brazilian-born, Christchurch-based founder of Autohand held senior engineering roles across Microsoft, GitHub and AWS, and played a pivotal role in the development and deployment of GitHub Copilot. 

It is an experience that gave him a close-up view of the potential of AI-assisted software development and of the trade-offs that come with putting powerful capabilities in the hands of a small number of global technology platforms.

Now Costa is building an alternative from New Zealand.

His startup, Autohand, is developing AI agents designed to take on more of the repetitive, time-consuming work involved in building and maintaining software. It also treats software as constantly evolving code that refactors itself automatically, avoiding going out of date and becoming a security risk.

But the company’s proposition is not simply that AI should write more code, or work faster. It is that businesses should retain control over the technology doing that work.

That is why Autohand has embraced open source, releasing its code and building around open-source models. For Costa, the issue is one of sovereignty as much as capability. A company using AI to understand its systems, access its codebase and act across its engineering workflow needs to know where its data is going, how its tools behave and what degree of control it can retain.

The market for AI coding tools is becoming crowded, well-funded and increasingly dominated by proprietary platforms. Costa’s bet is that a different model can succeed: powerful AI agents that are transparent, adaptable and deployable in ways that suit the organisations using them.

In this episode of The Business of Tech, Costa talks about the formative years of GitHub Copilot, why he chose to build a company from Christchurch, and why he believes the next phase of software development will be shaped not only by what AI can do, but by who owns and controls it.

It is a conversation about code, autonomy and the possibility that New Zealand can play a meaningful role in building the AI tools of the future.

Listen to the latest episode of The Business of Tech with Igor Costa, founder of Autohand, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.