Nobody should cry over a SaaS, of all things. But GitHub has meant so much more to me than that (all laid out in the post). I have an unhealthy relationship with it. Its given me so much and I'm so thankful for it. But, it's not what it used to be. I don't know.
We've been discussing it off and on for months, really started seriously discussing it a couple weeks ago, and made the final decision a few days ago. Putting metaphorical pen to paper and hitting "publish" makes it so very real.
I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
It's okay to have emotions. I have similar emotions. I'm GitHub User 22723 which is effectively the same as you (considering there's ~180m GH accounts nowadays)
My version of your post reads differently:
"GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
Walking away would be easy. I felt that way when I left Heroku ~six years ago. I left that job and never opened the Heroku dashboard again, after nearly a decade of happy use. I felt that it was irredeemable, and though it took a while, Salesforce did eventually succeed in running it fully into the ground.
I don't feel the same about GitHub. It is precisely because it's precious that I can't walk away. I'm not the only one here who feels that way.
In the past few years, GitHub has absorbed both a fundamental paradigm shift (agentic coding) AND several different hockey sticks of growth. It's messy. I'm not always proud of the results or the product choices we are forced into. But none of it feels like the Heroku/Salesforce debacle. Occam's razor applies here: it's not "more AI coding" and it's not "big bad Microsoft." It's scale, and a fundamental shift of the ground under all of our feet.
I hope we do the things that will make you want to come back. I hope we spark that joy in you again! It's not stupid to have big feelings about something that is so central to our lives as developers. Fuck that noise.
This is true but misleading. Unfortunately.
It is a true statement for developers working in GitHub at Microsoft. It's not a true statement for users.
There is no avenue by which you make GitHub better by continuing to use it as it has been.
In the same way that Mastodon didn't replace Twitter even when Twitter went to shit, I don't believe in the various GitHub alternatives becoming a broadly-used thing. Maybe we'll end up with more GitHub-alikes like Codeberg, mabye we'll end up with some communities adopting novel forges like Tangled and Forgejo. But it beggars belief that most of the millions of GitHub's users would switch to something so much more complicated. Has the same energy as "20XX is finally the year of linux on the desktop".
My very personal hot take: the likeliest happy future is _most likely_ to happen through improving GitHub. I vote with my feet to do that from inside, and that's all I wanted to add. Hence "I hope we do the things that make you want to come back one day." I believe in it enough that I choose to work here on exactly that, because like Mitchell, I care very much about the platonic ideal of GitHub. He's ready to move on, and I'm not yet. There's no value judgment hiding inside that.
I've moved my projects over to my own personal Forgejo (when I don't care about collaborating on them) and Codeberg (when I do). I find that ecosystem vastly simpler in the common ways that matter. For instance, viewing large diffs and syntax highlighted files is unbelievably faster, about as fast as GitHub's use to be before it was "improved".
For every way I use those forges as a solo or small-group contributor, the alternatives are as good as or better than GitHub today. Some product manager could become a company legend by figuring out how and why that is, then getting someone to do something about it.
To be clear- from a user perspective, "improving GitHub" means "restoring reliability to what it was 6 years ago". There's no killer feature that makes people stop leaving, if my PRs don't lead every third day and actions never work.
Uptime: 4 9s minimum for paying customers for the core service (not necessarily the social features, but pull requests have to work).
I can see the same happening for GitHub, in fact it seems to be actively trying to move in that direction: a platform for AI agents to host code, to review code, with little to no human activity.
Just like everyone who didn’t want to deal with bots left twitter, they will soon leave GitHub for similar reasons. I’m sure there is a future for GitHub as the code hosting platform for agents but it should be no surprise then when real people like Mitchell and the rest of us jump ship.
It’s their right, certainly, but it means I use GitHub as a Google Site replacement and my only active repo is archived whenever I’m not pushing commits to silence all the unwanted crap that comes with a GitHub repo. I’d be daft to ignore free hosting and I don’t care in the slightest that it’s one nines. Makes me laugh every time, though, to think of all those billion dollar AI-layoffs businesses having to stop AI work for a day because AI proliferation broke the freemium model and GitHub’s too hooked on being home to unfunded, mission-critical infrastructure projects to close the barn doors on free.
Autofill frequently doesn’t work. Passkeys are unreliable. Creating a new password doesn’t ever get saved.
Other than that it's fine, I guess.
This is funny, because 2025-on seems to be starting some couple years of Linux on the desktop/laptop. Valve introduced millions of people to gaming on Linux, bazzite is exploding in popularity, and that popularity is pouring into other projects like Omarchy, Mint, Ubuntu.
GitHub maybe will end up like Twitter - where the people who are there are there because they have to be, while the people actually enjoying their time online are on different platforms.
We've just been moving into a world where metric hacking is the desired outcome, not an outcome to try to avoid. These companies are only surviving because of their monopoly statuses. Because of momentum. It's a powerful force. It's the reason Twitter still is around. The reason Facebook is still around. But them being around doesn't mean they're good. It doesn't mean they're useful. It doesn't mean it is a good product. It doesn't mean the users like it. It just means people are used to the way things are and they aren't angry enough to leave for something else. But these companies are actively creating friction for users, daring them to leave, gouging them for everything they can. FFS Microsoft is the largest contributor (even more than Valve) to creating "the year of linux". Sure, it'll never have M$FT's market share, but it sure is eating into their revenue.
We've all lost sight of what made software so powerful in the first place. Why it became so successful and changed the world. We used to ship good products that help people, make their lives better, and make lots of money in the process. Now, I think all that anyone cares about is the last part. Now we're actively being hostile to those that make the systems better. And that system is fucked up and will destroy itself. That's not a good thing, because it does a lot of damage along the way. It is a system of extreme myopia.
In the last 5 years I'd argue that most software has made my life harder and more complex, not easier. There are definitely exceptions to this (ghostty being a great example), but there is a strong trend. I know I'm not alone in this feeling and I think we're getting to a point where a lot of people are no longer willing to dismiss their own gripes. This is not a good sign...
I'm glad you're optimistic. I do hope things can change. And my frustration is not directed at you. I really do want you to be right and I really do want to see change come from the inside. But I do not think those leading the companies now have any foresight. To be honest, I'm not even sure there's anyone at the wheel. It feels like we've just let the market forces steer the ship. If the currents steer the ship, then there's no captain, regardless of who claims the title. Frankly, I don't want to be on a ship without a captain, but here we are.
Ghostty and others leaving might be the only way that active users could actively and visibly signal a need for change.
The attitude of "stay to support the product" can prevent a better replacement. When Digg torpedoed themselves back in 2012 or whenever, that exodus was a big part of Reddit growing from niche to dominant.
I suppose us "normals" can push by making it easy to replace GitHub with something else, so that they start risking losing it all.
That's the job of GitHub's product and engineering teams, not the users.
It's interesting that internally you had a very different experience with Salesforce buying Heroku and Microsoft buying Github. From the outside it appears to be analagous (except github is degrading quicker than Heroku did?)
It's safe to say that I'm hypersensitive to these antipatterns and have been looking out for them at GitHub, and I don't see them.
What Microsoft wants GitHub to be is pretty much what GitHub wants GitHub to be. A home for all developers, playing a central role in the production of both public and private software. That alignment was never there with Heroku/Salesforce.
GitHub is not perfect but I don't think it's "degraded faster" at all. It's _grown_ faster. Much much much faster. And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards." Nobody knows what AI wants to be when it grows up. GitHub in 2026 fundamentally resembles a pre-PMF startup in many ways because of that. I'm obviously not an unbiased observer, but I wouldn't count us out just because it's an uphill. Everyone's on that same uphill.
Having experienced both firsthand, I fundamentally disagree that there's a parallel. GitHub/MSFT has the median amount of corporate bullshit. Not more, not less.
It’s grown in a way that degraded it and that required actual effort. For example:
- The fancy new diff viewer frontend that barely works. Someone wrote that code — it didn’t happen by itself.
- The unbelievably buggy and slow code review frontend (which is surely related to the diff frontend) was added complexity that did not need to happen. Its badness has nothing to do with how many users use it. It’s just bad in a no-scaling-involved way.
- GitHub actions. It’s … bad. I suppose there wasn’t a predecessor that was better.
> And it's had to expand into the AI field, which is not an incremental thing like "hey let's launch a new feature or better dashboards."
No, it did not have to expand into the AI field. A competent AI-free GitHub Core that could have an optional AI layer on top would have worked just fine if not dramatically better than the current mess.
(I say this as a paying user who will probably cancel soon. The Copilot reviews are kind of nice, but they’re not any better than a third-party system, and I’m getting sick of GitHub not working. Plus, the repos I’ve already migrated off of GitHub get to have nice non-AI things like gasp service accounts.)
Im an outsider and a layman, so this might be totally off base, but...
The way I hear people talking about github reliability doesnt sound like scaling problems to me. If you drive 20 miles every day but then decide to drive 2000 miles and run out of gas, thats a problem of scale. If you drive 2000 miles and your engine explodes, thats a problem of design.
Maybe their design problems are being made evident because of sudden scale, but they're still design problems.
There might not have been a predecessor, but it's been obvious for at least a decade that GHA are a very poorly designed programming language, yet nothing was done to improve. They introduced Github Apps that solve many of the issues with Actions, but that requires deploying a service and aren't anywhere near the ease of use of Actions.
Maybe a hot take: no, it didn't.
I think it had all the pieces (api,cli,etc.) already that it would've still be very useful in an AI world without deeply integrating AI things (copilot, etc.). I'd take higher availability over AI features any day.
Yes, and what Github wants public github.com to be is free QA for Github Enterprise. My company is a paying customer with 200 engineers and it's pretty clear we're just Guinea pigs for the Enterprise product.
My ID is just over 10,000. Crazy to think of the journey that I've had in computing since I signed up for GitHub.
Yehuda Katz was the first external user of GitHub after the cofounders, so his github user id is `4`.
The way Rails works, if you want to look up a user record, you do it by id:
author = comment.author
user = User.find(author.id)
TBH I'm not super invested in github. I pay for it (smallest plan) and use it as a repository and for forking other projects occasionally, and for hosting some small-time static sites. I've never really needed any of it's other features. Every time I go to github.com there's more and more cruft though, which to me means that I'm not their target customer and they will inevitably either alienate me or jack up their prices. Happens every time there's an acquisition so I'm kind of used to it now.
Github has remained surprisingly useful for quite a while post M$ purchase, but I'm old enough to know that everything M$ touches eventually goes to crap. It's like a law.
I remember using CVS and Subversion though, with very limited hosted options, and I thought Github was the bees knees at the time.
I think that was down to being in a particular IRC channel when CW & co. were building it.
When I was working at Microsoft I got transferred over to GitHub for awhile and someone there noticed my ID and made a big deal out of me having a 4-digit ID. :)
I never thought about it before then.
I had no idea that I joined so early. It says I joined in 20/2/2008. I guess I was following some of the founders' work in Rails when GitHub was announced and must have signed up shortly after it got started.
Created at 2010-10-27T23:42:22Z. 16 years! What a wild ride. I used to use bitbucket a ton back then. I loved it.
No idea how my two character handle made it through… Probably the wrong thread to ask anyone at GH to allow me to block notifications anytime anyone mentions "@ts" but I've come to accept it at this point, lol.
Will redirect to an image file whose title is your user ID! :D
ID: 67,498 Created: 2009-03-26
17 years, a month and two days ago.
I had just tried asking Gemini to help me get there, and it kept telling me to read line 2 of github.com, as if they were serving JSON on their homepage. :facepalm:
At a basic level I appreciate this sentiment. However, the common dysfunction I see in large corporation is its not the lack of people who give a shit. Its lacking a sufficient number of people in positions of power that give a shit -- such that they can actually make change happen.
All too often competing pressures (features, profit, delivery speed, politics) take precedence; not leaving time for things that would really move the needle. In essence, too many leaders are happy to ship garbage; they don't care (or don't know).
If Github were to put out a statement saying "service quality is our priority", it is fairly meaningless. If they added "here's how we'll get there", maybe it helps some. Moreso -- "from now on executive compensation is tied to these SLOs", then maybe something would actually happen.
The company leaders only care about features shipped. That's it. They only polish those features if they are shipped in such a broken fashion that they are actively causing outrage. Once the features are shipped, it's done, any additional resources on an already shipped feature is seen as wasted.
This permeates all aspects of modern corporate software, unfortunately. It's why the likes of C# and .Net is forever adding new frameworks and language features while abandoning the existing frameworks. It's why Microsoft has had more new UX frameworks than OS releases. It's why for the same setting Microsoft now has multiple panels for the same information, literally a panel introduce in windows 98, Vista, 10, 11.
The only time a company like MS kills a product is when that product competes in the same space as an existing product. For example, it's why they killed wordpad. It was offering features too close to what Word did for free.
The fact is, it costs almost nothing to add a feature. It costs a ton of money and resources to properly integrate, use, polish, and remove places that feature fits into. I can't imagine the amount of money MS paid to integrate copilot into everything.
It is a megacorp that is mainly in this situation because of its relentless pursuit of exponential growth for the benefit of a very select few to the detriment of everyone else (including GitHub employees such as yourself). The hockey sticks are there, but how they've reacted to them - which is what has lead to this situation - is entirely because of the above. If not for that, it could've reacted to them differently.
It does not deserve to get better.
It would be very good for society if GitHub's market share massively declined, if everyone moved away. It wouldn't be good for you personally, but it would be good for everyone else. There is nothing positive about a single company having access to everyone's code.
Just look at all the tricks you've been playing, automatically opting everyone in to having their code used for LLM training. [0]
GitHub shouldn't get better. It should decline in popularity.
You know full well that it is undeniable that your competitors gaining market share would be good for everyone as a whole, but comp juicy and emotional attachment to people there and the pre-acquisition times where it used to be a great company (those times are not coming back) and your past with them etc.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/github_ai_training_po...
I am using fossil now. I kind of love it, just a sqlite file with a very trim binary to interact with it. I get all of my things that I want (wiki, forum, issues, docs, etc) all in one file.
But that's just for fun. At work we are still tied to Microsoft Github. Just typing that out feels dirty.
Like Mitchell, GitHub was once a dream job for me, and it just never lined up pre-acquisition. I shared many of Mitchell's habits too, about GitHub being my reading material. Until some time after passing 2000 starred repos, I had literally read every line of code in each of them. GitHub still feels like home to me, as a user.
Good luck, and we're all counting on you.
(359439, which is quite high for this thread, it seems!)
Excellent example of why centralization is a bad thing. A Git “hub” is not a thing that should have ever existed for a self-described “distributed” version control system.
Nothing prevents usage of GH in a decentralized fashion. There's nothing magical about git remotes. Just add some more, figure out a process that works for you, have fun!
In reality: when I want to send a letter I don't want to figure out a process from scratch. I want to go to the local post office, buy a stamp, and post a letter.
Convenience is a spectrum and different people land in different spots. What irks me is when I lack the choice. And that's not the case here.
I completely understand a "people who give a shit stick around" mentality if you work there, but you can't expect users who run a business on it to stick around if it's broken.
I'm not encouraging Mitchell to stay, I'm saying that my version of his post is about _me_ staying to make a brighter future, and adding my context on why I still believe that.
And finally I closed with "I hope we win you back" to be extra clear about it!
What's the mechanism of action here? What changes if I stay? What changes if I give more or less of a shit? Is there javascript telemetry feeding my shit into a dashboard with a calibrated shitometer for executives to consult when they set quarterly objectives? My account is six weeks younger than mitchellh's and I've been watching GitHub fall apart for the last year, what will happen because I stick around to watch for another year? Besides that I will get covered in shit.
You're an employee. What changes if you stick around? Back in October 2025, the GitHub CTO Federov prioritized moving to Azure above feature work (https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...). Yesterday he recommitted to it (https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...), writing "We started executing our plan to increase GitHub’s capacity by 10X in October 2025 with a goal of substantially improving reliability and failover." GitHub has had six bad months of increasing bugs and sharply decreased uptime, and the CTO just recommitted to staying the course. You've explicitly been directed to move to Azure, not to give a shit or to make things better.
So I'll defer to your direct expertise. From the outside, Heroku stalled and died because Salesforce prioritized everything else in its business above Heroku. Are GitHub's priorities so different? Does you giving a shit make Azure and Copilot the best top priorities for GitHub? Will Azure and Copilot be why I stop seeing SPA jank? Will Azure and Copilot be why I can see my list of open PRs? Will Azure and Copilot be why I see something more than the 500 unicorn? Will Azure and Copilot stop the spam PRs that want to undermine the quality of my code? Will Azure and Copilot lead to anything other than the same corporate dismissal and dysfunction that led to Heroku? Will you giving a shit matter?
the thing about github that is so maddening is linus gave us the secret with git itself. then we reinvented centralized source control using git and called it github, and here we are.
Don't feel too bad, you are both essential to the process that ends in Github improving (or imploding).
The amount of impact I've seen to businesses around the US at least might as well be akin to a Covid shutdown, and that certainly has me thinking about what the overall impacts are on the US economy overall.
It's a product that is _de facto_ present in nearly all developer scenarios. There are scenarios where I personally believe public management is better than private management, e.g. single-payer healthcare is strictly better than the bullshit we have in the US now. It's fundamentally cheaper for the polity when the government negotiates with healthcare providers than each private insurer.
I don't think that's fundamentally the problem facing GitHub, and I don't think it would be better in any way — for anyone — if it were regulated like a utility. But again, I write javascript for a living. Take what I'm saying with a big-ass rock of salt.
Speaking of git adjacent services. Why did google code end? Was it too hard for them to monetize? I tend to have an aversion for signing up for stuff so have never had an account on either, but they had a lot of momentum. And them shutting down that service feels like the inflection point marking the end of the "don't be evil" period, A lot of open source projects got burned in that one. That or when they bought YouTube instead of developing their own google video further.
My guess is that abuse (people hosting files/data that google didn't/wasn't allowed to host) made it untenable for a service that wasn't generating revenue and had limited headcount.
Something like Google drive or yt could spend a lot more energy stomping it rather than the handful of folks from the open source programs team.
So crazy to see how money can ruin such a good thing.
> My version of your post reads differently:
> "GitHub only gets better if people who give a shit stick around to make it better"
> Walking away would be easy.
Especially with corporate owned software or SaaS ecosystems!
Sounds like you made the right choice with Heroku back in the day. I feel like this is Github's Heroku moment.
I would invest your energy in something worthwhile like an open source project, a non-profit, a social or political cause, a family memeber, etc.
> Occam's razor applies here
I think the simpler explanation is clearly that it's a for-profit company and these problems aren't worth fixing, and not a speculative engineering excuse. If Microsoft wanted to invest more, including in uptime, they could make it happen. They have over a trillion dollars.
“I won’t leave, I’ll fight to make this place better!” is a laudable trope ofc, but in this case you’re not making any place better, you’re just defending shareholder value. IMHO :)
Second, even if your comment was not an attempt to do ideological battle: neither the comment you replied to, nor the post linked, mentioned any pronouns, so your comment makes no sense. (Well, the comment you replied to used the pronouns I, we, and you, but first- and second-person pronouns are ungendered in the English language, so if that was what you were referring to then your comment still would make no sense). Were you trying to leave this on a different message?
This quote from the post resonated with me:
> I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.
The sentiment is shared, and github is not the only service making me feel like that, it feels like everything on the web is more flimsy and low quality nowadays. Constant outages, bugs, UI papercuts, incomplete features, what in the world is going on?
No AI needed at all. Only humans.
On the other, the economy and market conditions are brutal for the little guys. Incumbent behemoths hoovering up value, talent and financing.
Instead of shaking things up as usual when a major paradigm shift hits, AI has mostly been a centralizing, consolidating force. Not that I was expecting it to be otherwise, but it's certainly dismaying to witness.
Or am I being too pessimistic / glorifying the past?
It's easier than ever to make your own furniture. IKEA is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to publish a video game. Steam is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to 3D-print tractor parts. John Deere is bigger than ever.
It's easier than ever to switch to solar power. The petroleum industry is bigger than ever.
One person reverse-engineered Coca Cola, made an exact taste-alike and published the formula. You can make some at home. Coca Cola is bigger than ever.
Something fundamental is wrong with the economy.
I bet a small team of the quality of the kind developers who are attracted to hacking on Ghostty could recreate the subset of GitHub functionality they actually need in ~six months. It's just the problem of how to pay for the ongoing care, maintenance and hosting? Maybe another opportunity for Mitchell's particular brand of philanthropic OSS.
Of course, you lose out on some things like ease of user access and various protections.
Not just the web either. It feels like the whole world is in a race to throw shit together and cash out as quickly as possible: influencers, hustle culture, enshittification, etc.
My pet theory is that all of the global chaos around the climate, politics, pandemic, etc. is leading people to no longer believe in the future. Once you lose that, all that's left to care about is the right now. No one takes the time to scrimshaw the deckrails on a ship they believe is sinking.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or perhaps another adaptation:
God, grant me the serenity
to accept the enshittification I cannot change
the courage to improve the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.People need to stop bemoaning it, and think and do something. The enshittification is an idiotic, failing, extremely short-sighted strategy.
It's a huge opportunity - your competition has stopped investing in its product, fired its talent, treats its customers with utter contempt, and is managed by imbeciles. Who is a better target for disruption? Hire the talent, market your quality, treat your customers with respect, point out the BS your competition does every time they do it. Stop staring at your navel.
We each have to work on our areas of quality - and when everyone starts doing that, the world changes.
I think the "ridiculously dramatic" part is the whole love letter to GitHub, not the frustration.
And I think it is fair to say that it is ridiculously dramatic. Which is okay, of course, I'm not criticising here. Just like it would feel ridiculously dramatic (at least to me) if someone explained that they cried today when they stopped their subscription to Netflix in order to move to another service, because they love Netflix so much.
I don't think it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about great tools rusting or makerspaces closing...
I am just saying that when Mitchell mentioned it being "ridiculously dramatic", I think he was not talking about the frustration but rather about the fact that he cried about leaving GitHub.
It's okay to feel sad about something and to also feel that it's ridiculously dramatic to feel sad about it.
Thanks for the downvotes though.
Another gigantic unspoken issue is that people have started building tons of stuff with React on purpose for some reason.
Yes, it does.
> React is getting a bad rap because it’s visible when the issue is clearly their backend.
Two things can be bad! Except that in this case one of them is unnecessarily bad, because nobody forced them to use a front end system which defaults to terrible failure handling.
This is, in fact, on topic: github actions seemed to me like a bad idea from the start, to me, but I let my co-workers and "network effects" convince me that I was being grumpy and that it was fine, and so we've adopted it. And now ... here we are. It was exactly as bad I thought it was, and it reflected a broken engineering culture.
I am not again performance bonuses, but they should be attach to better metrics. Eg the number of happy users is still up in 3 years time. Or something like this.
Companies know how to make good product, but if they don't have "new and shiny" to impress us anymore, then their only alternative is to make things worse so they can heel turn and then make things "better" by unmaking all of the worse things they did.
They can also milk their customers coming and going in the process.
It's not "enshittify or lose", its just raw greed. Things will get better again, either that or a competitor will destroy them. Enshittification is just the current meta and a new one will come soon enough.
I think it's that company management has no incentive to do well. So they have no reason to push this down to the bottom tier of workers who actually make the products. The feedback loop is open. They make an order, the product gets worse, the line goes up, they don't know the product got worse and they have no reason to care anyway.
Slop didn't start with AI.
The West already forgot how to manufacture things, and we are now forgetting how to code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47907879
1. The company builds a moat and just remains shit.
2. New entrants either displace the company entirely (most likely) or competition slows the enshittification process (distant second) or reverses it (almost never).
Companies aren't getting cheap loans right now so they're desperate to juice their stocks so that upper management can secure their bonuses.
That's why "get shitty" is necessary.
When they've wrung it dry, pocketed all of the crumbs of raw cash they can get, then they'll either collapse due to overmilking their products or they'll realize that the only way to refatten the calf is to bring in new customers, so they'll unshittify it for the fresh infusion of customer money.
It's a cycle, and one I predict will inevitably lead to many of these companies' collapse.
I think it’s “find natural monopoly and reduce costs (aka enshittify)”.
Github is a natural monopoly and users cannot go anywhere. Unless you’re famous like Mitchell Hashimoto.
GitHub back in the day was a healthy version of "Move fast and break things". I wonder what's different.
AI slop code
It's not a coincidence that every impressive result done using AI has come from someone with a track record of impressive results before AI. AI isn't magic. It doesn't make you good at stuff you're bad at.
If it just shat the bed completely, you'd have an easy argument to replace it with something else; instead, it would be technically competent (Hi, Raymond!) but covered in stuff that made it infuriating to use (Hi, Redmond!), especially if you didn't live in it day in and day out.
FWIW, some people used to (or still do) say similar things that software is significantly worse because people use "unserious" languages like PHP, Ruby, Python, JavaScript. It brought about so much cool shit that I don't think it's worth saying we should've stuck with only C and Java.
That's definitely great for work life balance, and I don't think any less of them for that, but passion seems to be gone.
I would be doing what I do for work if I was employed or not. That's how everyone I used to work with was. Now everyone seems to do the minimal, with the goal being more to direct blame than solving neat problems.
Used to be nerds hanging out on IRC, distributing Slackware, hacking trialware, modding games, etc. that had the passion and problem solving determination to do software work, which used to be harder due to lack of access to information.
OTOH what a great time for a budding engineer. I'm in my mid 30s, and no longer have the same stamina and passion as in my teenage/20s, but in the last 5 years I've learnt so many things I could not have done so back in the day. I learnt and experimented way more around random topics like compilers, OS, electronics, databases because of ease of access to information, AI (:shrug:), even though I have way less free time.
CV-driven development, a treadmill of features nobody needs that hurts stability we do need.
Too bad it's not reminiscent of the Hotmail purchase where they tried to move off the BSD servers and ended up with new accounts on the relatively unreliable Windows-based setup, and old accounts routed to the original BSDs.
Have you ever tried to run anything from the 80/90s era? Segfault everywhere, "fatal error was successful", kernel panic, BSOD, screen freeze for any reason and its opposite.
Nothing serves better good all time than bad memory as they say.
Not that the gigabit of useless crap to show essentially a few ko of text is fine, but the abuses and horrors that humans commit just shifted a bit where they land, it's not like there was a time were we had a land free of human dirty stuffs.
KISS and you sleep better.
That and the problem of forever chasing trends and never saying: "It's done" without reinventing everything every couple of years (trends again)
Sounds too easy? It is of course simplified, but the core still holds true.
GitHub just worked, but they had to migrate to React because "that's what everyone else uses"... Pure Enshittification.
They seem to have changed the primary source of data in the issues and pull requests tabs (w/o filters applied) from the underlying database to the elasticsearch search index, which has the side effect that there's a noticeable delay between state change of an issue/pr and an update in the UI. But as seen today, these can get out of sync, and apparently they even had data loss in the index.
I would really like to know their reasoning for making that change. I can totally imagine that they wanted to "simplify" so the UI uses only a single data source instead of two.
As a user it's incredibly annoying to have a delay between issue/pr state changes and the search index picking it up.
When the outage happened yesterday I sort of figured it was something I had been noticing building up or something.
With that said, Mitchell complains about outages. These started directly after Microsoft acquisition[4] and are attributed to migration from AWS to Azure.
[1] https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/ho...
[2] see html source for tags
Yesterday we saw PR pages that displayed no error, just displayed wrong info. I would have preferred to get an error page than outdated or empty lists. I was guessing this was related to the React migration but I don't really know.
Like, what user-hostile intention was the reasoning behind that? I am literally imagining a product manager smoking a cigar and laughing at the RUM session replays of me losing my shit.
We weren’t even in the same circles and this was my first good conference, but my own little company that I worked at was full of motivated hackers that were trying to wrap our heads around what you already understood.
You took my comments about on-boarding and documentation very humbly and you knew what I was really saying was: keep it up.
You sure did keep it up.
Those same team mates are here with me using TF at a different company years later, and we’re still pushing left.
Those colleagues just said “it’s art and science”
… and when the art gets ripped away from you, what you described is a natural reaction.
Still, keep it up.
Thanks for being human and making ergonomic software for humans.
The spool of wire became a prominent metaphor on the app, representing something that might seem meaningless to others, but holds sentimental and nostalgic value to its owner.
No, it's not. There are things we like/love in our life, and we rightfully get sad when things go bad in the camps we like, support.
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing. But I truly love GitHub, and I hope they find their way.
I personally won't and will be angry to the people who do. Been there, done that for different things. We're human, this is normal.
For finding their way, I can't be that optimistic, unfortunately. Sorry about that.
Ghostty will be fine wherever it lives because people follow the project and not where it's hosted. Best of luck!
> Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year
How could you not feel this way about a tool you willingly use this much? Perhaps if your employer is forcing you to use it, its different. But maintaining OSS? that's a labor of love. How could you not get emotional?
I'd be absolute crushed if Linux (for example) morphed into something I could not/no longer wanted to use, part of the reason I use open source wherever I can is because that is less likely to happen, Inkscape is still inkscape nearly 20 years after I started using it, so is Gimp, so is KDE, they've all changed but the essence of them is still the same (so has Linux).
We don't cry over things, we cry over what things mean.
I don't see anything wrong with grieving the loss of a community and environment that led to so many meaningful experiences for you.
To be honest, I never understood the fascination with github. Its a hub, of git repos. Not to piss on your parade, because your complaints are valid, but maybe isnt github that as gone sour as much as you have grown out of it. This was your passion, now its over and you move on.
We started groundwork to migrate out of GitHub in the last couple months. Not because of outages (we're a small team, we manage), but because of security, since we operate in a space that is under constant threat of cyber-attacks.
So we're working on an hybrid git+blockchain model where key actions are onchain and the log state is truly immutable... we will first use it ourselves and probably release it too.
This is more than a SaaS, for you and the others. Stating kind of the obvious: without it Vagrant, Terraform and heck, even Hashicorp would have not been the same - or probably even existed. Despite probably being a later user of GitHub I share the same feelings. It's so sad to see GitHub, a product and company I once respected a lot, getting trashed by Microsoft and all of these outages.
I think because GitHub has been such an important part of my life dating back to the very start of my career - just like you.
And it’s not just the technology, it’s the people. All the great projects there. The countless README’s I’ve dissected trying to setup something new. There’s people behind all of that and that always felt exceptionally meaningful to me.
It has been profoundly emotional to watch GitHub degrade over the past year. It’s almost like watching someone you love slip away. Which I have also done. It’s not the same, but there is something familiar in the pain.
Meanwhile streamers dunk on it in YouTube videos and on X and none of it is funny to me. It’s just tragic.
Now I’m choked up. Dammit all to hell.
I do feel kind of sadness right now it is a zombie that current owners are just pumping out whatever is left out of it.
I don’t care about GH I felt centralized repositories like that is wrong.
Q/A was supposed to be centralized because we need people to find the questions and answers in a single place.
GH or others should be just referring to repositories not keep them… be a search engine for decentralized repositories.
And boy, does it hurt.
That’s just to say that crying over GitHub is fine, you’re a human, we cry over all sorts of stuff. Emotions are weird and you should not feel badly for having them.
And I mean, they clearly can; your own contributions are proof of that. We can all do better and the decline isn't a prescription we all need to follow. Regardless, it's tough to watch. Github used to be such an exciting and promising platform.
Leaving any emotions aside, all the arguments you gave are technical and carry weight: we are not always in the mood for OSS work -- or even have the time and energy, which happens to be the much more oft limitation -- and when we are, we want our infra to just work. If it does not, that might kill your motivation for a week. Or a month.
For an OSS contributor, the main one even, this is actually bad news. You are doing both yourself and your community a big service by making this difficult decision.
Not everyone can do it. Respect.
If you're still considering vendors, I think you'll find some of the keep it simple ethos can still be found among OSS friendly vendors -- Codeberg, etc. Good quality & uptime doesn't have to be expensive - just grounded by people that care enough to reject the scope creep and focus on doing one thing well.
Same :( their 9 5's is embarassing
Thanks for Ghostty, been my daily driver for awhile now. Hope the rest of your day/week goes much better!
Or do you have a better idea of what the plan exactly is?
No, it won't bypass P≠NP either.
I’m a big fan of ghostty and also unenamoured with the current state of GitHub and Microsoft.
That is to say I believe this is an opportunity to disrupt the incumbent player and I’m game. HMU if you feel similar and want to discuss.
I was talking about the same thing just yesterday. GitHub with its friendly mascot is no longer. It's now just another SaaS platform that everyone including my non technical colleagues are using. Their push towards everything-AI is the exact opposite of what they stood for in the begining. A community of like minded people who wanted to build great tools and loved software. But yet no longer. GitHub now feels like a soulless SaaS that's trying to hook my onto an enterprise subscription and bring my whole team along so we can all do some agentic coding or whatever.
Unity taught me how to program and , along with JavaScript turned me from a college dropout to a software engineer.
Finished my degree later.
I still love Unity, but the company is stable. If I friend needs help with a Unity project, I'm down, but I start all my new games with Godot.
I'm not sad though. Unity is like a friend I'm still cool with, we just drifted apart.
But from a realistic point of view. Did we really think Unity and GitHub were charities in pursuit of the greater good.
Of course not. They cashed out, made money and whatever good they did along the way was a nice side effect.
GitHub made working in the open a joy. It's very sad the state that it's in.
"Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
"I'm not going to force you to switch over to decentralized, I'm just going to call you ugly and stupid. That's the deal."
Mitchell, when I was in 10th grade and had to pick my streams which led me to pick comp-sci/stem rather than finance (I am going to college soon), I thought of my dream life and it was being on a vacation/beach using Linux or terminals and opening github and contributing to open source software. I simply couldn't imagine my life without terminal (funny because ghostty is the terminal that I use)
You said that you have been with Github for 18 years, that is longer than the time I have been on earth. You were (and in some sense are!) living my dream life in that sense and github fulfilled its role, it had helped you until recently when it has started to get worse and worse.
my point is you have an special bond with github and for good reason,so to remove an somewhat integral part of all of this (github) after so long will have emotional feelings and outbursts.
I hope that you are doing fine, Ghostty/your-work has a positive impact on my life and gives a hope by being a relaible tool I rely on, I wish nothing but the best for Ghostty and you personally.
Quote the opposite. We need to leave so they receive the message in order to fix it. As far as the suits know, life is swell. So much so they can't keep up with demand. Be sure to say why you are leaving too, so they know what to fix.
I thought that GitHub was so unreliable that it would be better to self host instead of use the service [0]. It turns out that 6 years later, that was the case and it doesn't sound crazy anymore.
The problem is GitHub was neglected and the AI agents ran it into the ground and we need to now self host.
> I'm sure folks will make fun of me for this. It is a stupid thing.
Brother, it is not a stupid thing. We need more in the world of what you are doing here. Never change on this count.
We have all been deeply involved, constructed careers and sharpened our tools with technology and hopefully for the benefit of technology. I can only imagine how deeply sad the current state of software is for those talented individuals that helped to carry it to here.
Some of us can at least hide it with cynicism because there is not much at stake, but emotional honesty is very much appreciated.
This is all to say I have tremendous respect for you. Which is why I say:
You also have the resources to fix this. You not only have the resources and skill Mitchell, to make it happen - You know everything that it takes to be the CEO of a Billion dollar unicorn - you have the connections, you have the vision.
More importantly, Mitchell, you care.
Make it happen. You have done it a few times before. Do it again.
Nobody should be in an emotional turmoil because they can't do a PR in a 2h window during a day.
We should all learn to take things more slowly, because our current accelerationist society is detroying the planet, and is destroying social ties.
Because, if you get that emotional from on a non-functioning tool... wait until you discover how our non-functioning democracies allowed for a genocide to happen in Gaza, for people in the south to be doing slave-work for our AIs to satifsy people in the north, etc
If this is the truth, this is not normal. I'm not saying that in a judgmental way but from a place of good intention. You might want to check out your testosterone levels.
On what are you basing that?
> it's 100% fine (and healthy) to care about things in life.
Yes it is and I didn't claim it wasn't, so this is a strawman.
There's nothing personally indicting about having low testosterone. It's relatively common and it's potentially a serious medical condition. There is no reason to take offense from this.
I wanted to add a counter to that and say they are very normal and support them rather than suggest they go to the doctor.
My assessment of your intentions was wrong, as I can't know that, but I stand by the other two statements.
I don't see a reason to counter anything I said. I offered neutral information that may help the OP. If the OP's testosterone levels are indeed low due to a serious medical condition, then you've just done them a major disservice. Even if you're of the opinion that it's normal, it's reasonable for someone else to assess that feeling sadness to the degree of provoking tears in response to deciding not to use productivity software is a cause for concern.
Weak man argument. They said low T is "potentially" a serious condition.
Regardless of the reason, it's undeniable that GitHub is facing some serious issues. The unofficial status page[1] tells a horrifying story.
I would absolutely love to get some insider perspective on this (if only to learn how to prevent it from happening anywhere I work), but I think it's clear to anyone who has been paying any attention that GitHub is a sinking ship and the only reason people haven't abandoned it already is inertia. Considering how much else is changing in software right now I don't think inertia is enough to sustain a company.
I do not work at MSFT but I don't feel that I need insider perspective to understand what's going on. GitHub is being managed the way other services get managed once they're bought by big companies. Initially fine, then starts to decline, then eventually craters. Everything becomes the numbers game.
Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, CA (where software goes to die), Salesforce, the list goes on. Every once in a great while there's a good M&A team that doesn't fuck it up but that's sadly rare.
As so often happens, that didn't last long.
Nest was originally independent. Didn't take long for it to merge with the Google Home brand.
I'm sure there are countless other examples.
It is honestly so shameful that we keep falling for this gambit. It is nothing more than a rank "but this time is different!"
Economics is what drives things. It is what drives things in households and it is what drives things in companies.
Unless times are truly great or the company is truly forward-looking, promises of freedom and independence from the business cycle is just an empty promise of creating a research lab.
And its not like Github's load stayed linear over the last 8 years since the acquisition. Repo creation and pushes went exponential about 2 years ago with the AI boom, so even with fantastic execution I think they'd still be struggling hosting the ever expanding archive of all code in the world.
I'm not sure who "we" is in this story, but the _most_ optimistic of my peers pointed to typical MS projects of that scale having a little proper investment in interesting features and also taking at least a couple years to fail. HN sentiment wasn't positive either. The 99th percentile in favor of MS were fine with it, but the 90th percentile recognized the M&A for what it was, especially as specific features started showing their colours.
Lest this come across as a drive-by insult, I'm actually very curious who "we" is. Humanity is a very, very broad spectrum, and my intuition often doesn't appropriately capture the divers backgrounds of real people, despite spending large amounts of time with (usually from working alongside) deck-hands, captains, sanitation workers, bankers, pilots, jackhammer operators, semi drivers, farmers, programmers, mathematicians, and a host of other people. The gap I'm seeing is likely in my understanding (rather than, e.g., the post being mal-formed), so I'd like to correct that.
Neither me nor dozens of my acquaintances fell for it. 100% of us said "GitHub is toast, it's just a matter of time". And we and many others were right.
Your "we" is misplaced.
Not sure if it mattered after that but they had that weird Tom Preston-Werner scandal that got him fired. Since he was the CTO, I kind of suspect that sent them on a collision course with needing to exit the VC round and Microsoft paid out.
All long term business goodwill and reputation is simply there to burn to keep the bubble going.
It's called a vesting schedule. ;)
What I've seen is that usually the founders and heavy hitters from the original company are very BS-averse and basically just stay around to collect their money and then jet for a situation that doesn't suck.
For the rest of the gang, it tends to bifurcate: some folks stay at the big company indefinitely after the acquisition because while they can see the suck, nowhere else pays as well or is as cushy (I know people who have been thinking about leaving for 12 years). Still others excel at big company work and make a happy career out of it for a while but don't stay forever.
I’d like to offer a different perspective: the “institutional knowledge” often (but not always, of course) are the old timers that have been gatekeeping knowledge in order to make themselves irreplaceable.
I’ve seen this a couple of times, even in faang-sized companies.
I’m not sure this is the case of GitHub though.
It might be due to lower quality code spit out by some llm, reviewed by some llm and shipped to production by some llm-generated pipeline.
Also, wasn’t github pushed to move to azure?
Anyways, it surely is a strong signal of engineering culture degrading.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Like what does "fine" mean? What, specifically in the management, is the "decline"? What does "craters" mean?
If you filter for major/critical outages, their uptime of core services in trailing 12 months all have two 9's.
https://isgithubcooked.com/?severities=major.critical
Also, a huge part of their cumulatively-bad availability story is copilot, which is a functionality (LLM inference) that most organizations have struggled to get two 9's of availability in for the last 9 months.
The things aren't profile pictures not loading in saudi, they're botching merge jobs, git/api operations being down, pull requests not loading, etc. And that's on top of the plethora of UI bugs that have been pervasive for years that aren't blocking functionality.
Given GitHub has become a utility service globally this should be frankly worrisome to everyone let alone the developer community actively using it. It’s intertwined into many things now beyond simply source code hosting and PRs. And I am surprised GitHub leadership is ok with the state of things. Having worked at a lot of 5-6 9’s shops, this would have been all hands on deck, all roadmaps paused, figure it out or perish sorts of stuff.
I think at least three 9's would be the baseline. But I'm also sympathetic that they had a *post-exit* scaling of write volume of like, idk, 1000x???
Very few orgs would survive that kind of scale and retain three 9's.
If it weren't bad enough, github often has issues when the unofficial status page doesn't report them, so the actual number is even worse.
And nobody learned their lesson and they all piled over to the next centralized system that offered "FREE!".
And so it goes.
Edit: 2001, I see one (1) banner ad, and that ad was seemingly for an OSDN (Open Source Developer Network) conference. https://web.archive.org/web/20010517002942/http://sourceforg...
Given SourceForge only hosted Open Source software, and had no source of revenue beyond ads and sponsors for quite a long time, AFAIR, I think they get a pass on a banner ad.
(My SF account dates from June 2004. I expect I was thinking about using it as version control for a FOSS project I was working on at the time, though I don't know why, as it seems SF didn't support svn until 2005. Maybe I couldn't find any better options? The pre-GitHub ecosystem was pretty bad! But, luckily, I ended up not having time for any FOSS stuff from about autumn 2004, so: problem solved. And when I next looked, in early 2010, everything seemed to be git+github, and all the better for it.)
GitHub was in the right place at the right time to be a success despite the fact it's a massively clobbered together mess.
On the other hand, I can't help but think that some of this heartbreak would have been avoidable, if only he possessed more of the Richard-Stallman-esque attitude that non-free software is inherently suspect and unethical. Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
I've also used Github for a significant chunk of my life, often because I had to for my job. But I've never developed an emotional attachment to it. Indeed, I have long been annoyed that Github is someone else's proprietary software, that does what it can to structurally lock users into their platform despite being built upon free-software git.
I've never been able to love software that requires an email-based account and accepting terms of service and that doesn't work in Iran because the company that runs it obeys US sanctions law.
So without reservation on my end, I'm glad to see that ghostty is moving off of github to something else.
Yup. At KDE we never seriously considered GitHub. We always built our own git infra, and eventually landed on GitLab, after banding together with Gnome and a (generous and forthcoming) GitLab to convince them to move everything we needed from the Enterprise Edition to the free software Community edition.
I think we've had exactly one multi-hour git outage in 16 years.
It's not unlike the emotional drama I see each time Netflix raises prices (people get really upset about that), or video game discussion (the worst). If it's not worth the the value proposition, move on ... don't hang on / waste emotional cycles on Netflix or something like that ...
Granted I'm not a robot, I get the the emotional connection too, I think back to my early days in computing and I still fondly think of the now defunct manufacturer of my first PC, later the Windows 95 start me up commercials ... it was something magical.
What I ended up with is a version of a static forge - Charm's soft-serve to host the repos and a forked version of the pico.sh pgit git static site generator. I added git-bug integration to track issues in the repo and an alternative CLI to git-bug that works better when collaborating with agents.
A static forge site is very resilient to bot traffic because it only renders a limited number of commits, instead of pathologically allowing a near infinite number of URLs for bots to crawl.
https://kilimanjaro.io if you want to see what it looks like.
Issues and CI are the only lock-in. The latter is legitimate because you're using someone else's CPU, but every developer has the tooling to "git diff" and write comments if we could just agree on a format.
And I remember seeing that and thinking "huh... not at all a bad idea."
There is a specific kind of leader that can turn such ships around, and they are strong in their convictions, and aren't just "managers", but visionaries coupled with strong execution and power to attract talent.
I think a new GitHub will emerge and when it's just right, will grow like wildfire (like OpenClaw, or even GitHub itself did during the SVN and SourceForge era). And many are already trying to be that new GitHub.
However, I consider that there is still not a great UI for the core service, in special for a complex project.
In the other hand, I bet jujutsu has the best basic take, and is still missing a good forge.
At first I thought the KDE apps all playing on the K was kinda weird and awkward, but as time went on I really appreciated how easy it was to search for them due to this. So I really think it's a benefit to play on traditional words rather than use them as-is.
jjplace/jjhub/codetown, whatever. Doesn't matter.
Names don't matter that much for brands. Names just have to be simple enough to remember (ideally two syllables or less). What the heck does Nike mean, for example? Boeing is just someone's name. Microsoft is just two words smashed together. A brand's name literally doesn't matter.
If AI replaces software development the way that big tech company management wants it to, maybe they'll converge again. In the mean time, people want a git remote and they're getting an unstable host diluted with some flaky vibecoding bullshit.
It'll probably never happen. But it'd be really nice if it did.
Do you know that you can just send a patch via email (assuming you're not using the gmail web client)? You can even save the diff on some hosting website and send the link via any text medium.
It's a bit short of actual PRs, but in some ways, especially with agents, the lo-fi approach has some advantages.
Really? I can only think of two: Codeberg and Sourceforge. Which are both great, but that's not what I'd call "many".
I guess it's possible that my experience is wildly different than others, but if we're talking about volume of usage today rather than individual preferences, it's kind of shocking for me that someone wouldn't think to reference Gitlab at all in the list of potential successors, let alone not mention it literally first.
- frequently needed navigation links buried within menus within other menus
- menus labeled by mysterious icons, sometimes with mysterious text, sometimes with no text at all
- authentication system that has failed me in a variety of ways over the years, even locking me out of an account in one case
- client-side script execution required to do anything all, even simply display a file
As I said, I haven't kept a list, but GitLab is very much in the category of interfaces that were built by javascript fanatics who don't understand (or don't care about) ergonomics or privacy. I accept that not everyone is bothered by its many problems, but I avoid it when I can.
Has anyone else shared this sentiment? If so Redmond needs to lean in hard.
this is an absolute killing blow for Microsoft if it gains real traction. You made developers your cornerstone eight years ago for nearly 8 billion dollars. you spent another 2bn on minecraft to clinch the deal with young developers and the code camp kids.
Youve lost the OS, and the server realm. Lose the developers, and youre on your way to becoming the Xerox of the 21st century.
This is a very HN take. MS is terrible or at best "second tier" on everything they do including gaming, they also lost the mobile race, they're very likely going to lose the AI race, but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.
There's a reason why writing .docx was one of the first proper skills that Claude got.
It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.
I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.
I can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuits. M365 and O365 are already super shady in terms of being able to migrate out or be interoperable with other solutions. "Accidental" roadblocks almost everywhere.
I'm old enough to remember this happening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open...
Basically, Microsoft furiously bribed their way into formally standardizing the utterly broken MS Office formats, so EU and potentially other regulators couldn't mandate them to be "interoperable" with existing standards (e.g. OpenDocument, based on OpenOffice, which was on its normal way to become standardized with no fast tracking and no bribing). They even called it "Office Open" to foster confusion.
They can do whatever they want and get away with it because a big part of their business model is, much like Oracle and SAP, based on bribing government bodies across the world.
Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.
As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.
It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.
What is this a reference to? Fuchsia?
Personally I think not enough credit to macOS here; Apple's Mach/XNU has been microkernel flavored since the NeXT days and many subsystems run in userspace like Windows.
People are ANGRY about the AI boom impact right now and "microslop" is trending harder than "M$" back in the day.
MH had a weird ass set of Tweets a month or so ago talking about GitHub needing disruption and how the UI was bad. Now it's "Not fun anymore".
I guess you die a hero or live long enough to be irrelevant and shouting at clouds like Stallman.
Work at a company on GH Enterprise. Outside those recent major incidents and a few spots here and there we haven't even noticed issues. It NEVER comes up on engineering or leadership meetings as an issue or risk. Not a single time has GitHubs issues come up as an agenda item. Yeah, YMMV but still...
A suggestion: use git-bug https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug in addition to migrating to another forge like Codeberg. It saves issues, PRs etc in git itself (not on a branch - on a specially crafted ref). It offers two way sync with a lot of providers.
Other VCSes like fossil store issues alongside the repo. I think it's appropriate because in a sense, issues are part of what gives meaning to the code (like documentation)
I use it for my project[0] to keep issues centralized with the repo, but I still use Github Discussions as a pseudo-bug tracker to let random users provide input. If it's a bug I add it to git-bug and sync it to Github issues for public viewing[1], but if you want use bug reports that's not really going to work.
[0] https://github.com/stryan/materia
[1] Ironically I got this workflow idea from ghostty and mise, both of which require users to submit bug reports as discussions first and only generate tagged issues once an actionable bug is determined.
Technically the issues in Fossil are part of the repository, along with the wiki, code, forum, etc. They come along with every clone and (mostly) cannot be deleted from the historical record.
Items of Fossil that are merely "alongside" instead of actually in the repository include unversioned files, chatroom content, and users and access controls. (Not an exhaustive list.)
You don't want to start your Saturday morning declaring an _action struct, then filling the rest of the day staring at research papers about the current state of fast homomorphic encryption.
I was thinking about fossil in the context of agentic workflows the other day, after seeing a co-worker go all in on sort of shifting themselves to a TPM workflow, using a locally hosted kanban board (inspired by OpenAI's Symphony).
It'd make things easier to have everything shoved into the repo, other than that everything is now shoved in the same repo being handled by the barely constrained chaos monkey that is an LLM coding agent. Locking things down gets hard if it's got access to the whole thing there.
1. Increasing amount of AI-generated code in their codebase, decreasing the quality of the service.
2. Bought by Microsoft, and their bad engineering culture has spread to GitHub.
Perhaps it's a bit of both.
According to GitHub, Azure migration is the attempt at a fix/upscaling, not the underlying cause of the issues.
Addressing GitHub’s recent availability issues: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/addressing-gi...
An update on GitHub availability: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
The issue is that they're not a scrappy startup anymore, they are defacto running the internets development infrastructure and are owned by a trillion dollar company.
So the bar they're measured by has changed and they haven't even tried to keep up, paying lip service to reliability when you are critical infrastructure is not going to go well.
There were reliability issues in 2010 for sure, but it feels worse now; the period before acquisition was the most stable (2014-2017).
Im old enough to remember the hotmail migration to win2k (then 2k3) and the postmortem. I was also old enough to look at the rotor source code. Yah, that one, running managed code in freebsd.
They said they're designing for a future that would require 30X of today's scale.
They did not say that they need to scale 30X to meet today's demand.
To be fair, the "demand is up 30X" claim was spammed all over social media so it's easy to see why this topic is so misunderstood
I've never pushed a commit and thought huh, I wonder what copilot thinks of this.
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
1. The acquired company was small company to the acquirer. 2. We need to improve scalability and reduce cost!
Then, they migrated. The new system was worse and didn't have parity. It was years. Customers were moving off. The project/product shut down.
If that’s the case, then it’s not necessarily a problem with Azure itself.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...
I suppose it's a bit too on the nose to point out that git is decentralized and itself doesn't really suffer from this, nor need it.
They dont have a service usage problem they have a slop problem. Ban the slop and the platform will thrive
I would not be surprised if Github has to stop offering so many services for free.
They aren't, of course. The Y axis is missing. GitHub didn't have 0 daily commits at the start of 2023.
https://handsondataviz.org/how-to-lie-with-charts.html#exagg...
I‘ve noticed that some projects have „Claude“ as one of their top three contributors.
Short aside, I have to rehost dotnet CLI binaries because their hosting infrastructure is so unreliable that it was causing CI failures regularly.
Gamedev being the most prominent that I have personally witnessed.
EDIT: Why are you booing me, I'm right.
It started being very bad when MS pushed for AI
uptime:
Incomplete pull request results in repositoriesSubscribe Update - We are actively reindexing the remaining ElasticSearch indexes. Our priority is ensuring correctness and avoiding further impact. We are taking a measured approach to safely backfill data and will share additional updates as progress continues. Apr 28, 2026 - 15:58 UTC Update - After yesterday’s incident, we are investigating cases where /pulls and /repo/pulls pages are not showing all indexed pull requests. This is because our Elasticsearch cluster does not currently contain all indexed documents.
No pull request data has been lost. As pull requests are updated, they will be reindexed. We are also working on accelerating a full reindex so these pages return complete results again. Apr 28, 2026 - 14:51 UTC Investigating - We are investigating reports of degraded performance for Pull Requests Apr 28, 2026 - 14:17 UTC
GitHub took a massive hit in credibility when it got bought by Microsoft. We are a burned generation, we have seen the worst of Microsoft. This created a massive crack in the foundation of trust for most people.
Then Copilot happened. Some people dug how the training is done, and one GitHub employee responded by mail that every public repository including GPL repositories are included (the relevant Tweets are deleted unfortunately). The created crack has deepened. Some of us (incl. me) left GitHub.
As Copilot entrenched, Microsoft's product development practices and philosophy took over, and vibe coding started to be used by hordes of developers, GitHub's code foundations started to crumble. Add the big migrations they're doing & regressions they are causing on the UI now, and we're here.
GitHub's first enshittification cycle is over. Now we're starting the second cycle. The bloated, slow, entrenched hegemon's decay from relevance phase.
It'll be a slow decay. It won't fall in a day, but they golden era is long gone.
Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.
> Re: GPL, there are other open access datasets of git repos that make some distinctions between copyleft licenses but those are older resources now.
Arguably "The Stack" contains only permissively licensed code, but there are two repositories of mine inside it. One is a very simple logging library, without any license (which implies "All Rights Reserved"), and another is a fork of LightDM which I worked on, which is GPL licensed.
So any "permissively licensed" dataset probably contains at least one copylefted or strong copyrighted codebase, making them highly suspicious.
== EDIT ==
Found some. Kagi's date-constrained search to the rescue.
1. Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31847931
2. GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33226515
3. AI-Powered GitHub Copilot Leaves Preview, Now Costs $100 a Year: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/06/25/0334207/ai-po...
4. GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories (CTRL+F on the page): https://web.archive.org/web/20260428180443/https://github.co...
Some projects that seem interesting: - https://tangled.org/ seems to be building out cool and exciting ways to write and interact with code (and they're distributed on the ATProto! But notably that's not their core selling point) - Microservices like https://pico.sh/ and https://sr.ht/ feel like fresh air...
They are still a WIP but it’s on our roadmap to continue to improve.
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/07/sonos-officially-appoin...
So where are we going? Mitchell will be deciding for Ghostty. If github's current trajectory is anything to go by, everyone else will need to decide where to go sooner rather than later.
I'm worried that it will be a Babel scattering event and this open source superpower that github catalyzed (how to describe it?) will just evaporate.
I'm also worried that wherever we go next could have the same fate as github.
So what then? Radicle is the only thing that I've seen that could theoretically 'solve' the problem, though it still needs a lot of work: https://radicle.dev/
Companies will keep using GH for a long time because they seem to be really tolerant of outages (and have a massive switching cost depending on how much of GitHub they use outside of git).
Smaller teams/solo devs much less so.
Isn’t really anyway to coordinate it ahead of time, it’s more an emergent bottom up thing than a “all devs agree to move to X” ahead of time.
It does seem like it might, in general, be a very opportune time for GitLab (or another host) to publicly step up!
There seems to be a lot of chatter on X recently about wanting an entirely new GitHub usurper that doesn't look like GitHub at all, but in the short- to medium-term I expect this not to gain a huge amount of traction because of the sheer cultural embeddedness of git + GitHub in modern day software development.
Last week I encountered a bug where my merge request simply didn't show that I deleted a file. Apparently it's because my MR included the creation of a folder with the same name as the basename of the deleted file. Unacceptable for a code hosting platform.
Other than that I miss GH Actions, a clear ui (gitlab has way too many sub-menus), a responsive ui (gitlab feels very sluggish). And while we don't have the Gitlab duo activated, it still pops out regularly eventhough I can't use it besides closing it. ...and I don't even want to start with their issue buard.
It strongly reminds me of Jira in terms of quality, which is no compliment.
I think Atlassian and Microsoft are genuinely in a competition to see who can make worse software and still have customers.
I wish Codeberg the best, but I thought it was a questionable choice for Zig and feel similarly for Ghostty—doesn't seem like a strict improvement.
When you take OSS projects that scale well, say Linux, Postgres, Kafka, redis, etc. they either scale up (Linux) which is arguable easier, or were able to scale out because there are thousands, if not millions, that have massive deployments pushing them to their limits.
Unless there is some sort of secure way to “open source” operational data for codeberg, or many others running huge deployments of Forgejo I don’t see it being very effective.
I do see Google having another go at code hosting though.
In what way(s)?
From GitHub's Staff Research Engineer https://maggieappleton.com/zero-alignment/
And wdym even mean "lead the direction of tech". Its just people trying to build a product based on their views/vision.
Others are free to build their own competing visions? and everyones free to choose the platforms that they use.
I'm sorry but this is just a perfect encapsulation of why American corporations are brazenly bad and corrupt without actual competition.
This is honestly no different than RFK Jr being the Secretary of HHS. I'm sure if you spoke with him, he'd say he was highly competent at this job too.
I’m not sure what staff level means at GitHub, but at some other companies it’s just “senior++”, and people with 10yoe get that title quite often.
It’s not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software.
Github is really Microsoft. The above paragraph captures perfectly what it's like to work in a big company like Microsoft.
When Github was a startup, it was both a tech company and a social media for coders and a real-life social scene (especially in SF, some pretty epic stories over the years).
Once Github was acquired, it was a countdown to all the soul being sucked out of it and simply a mechanism being left behind.
Good luck to the team with migration! (And here's hoping it's ersc :))
I really wish an open-source developer of his caliber would also migrate to a serious microblogging service which isn't so openly hostile to truth and civility. Ending the sticky network effect of an evil service starts with its biggest, most prolific users migrating away.
This is the same bullshit that people bring up with Facebook, there’s no reason we can’t apply the same rubric to Twitter.
And also, there's some alternate microblogging site that is less hostile to truth and civility? Which site is that?
Tangled uses the identity stuff from atproto which lets the important stuff (git, CI, etc) be decentralized while people only need one identity to contribute (and you can self host your PDS too). So nothing ends up being reliant on a third party.
For me that's a minor problem. The struggle of working across multiple code forges or making my code available on multiple is syncing CI/CD, issues, releases between them. I don't have the energy to maintain multiple versions of a pipeline.
Best decision ever.
100% uptime. 100% less stress with each of the product/pricing changes over the past few months.
Was also able to build my own GitHub Copilot equivalent that auto-reviews MRs interactively.
Highly recommend it.
I remember quite a few years ago it having its own set of problems.
I have nothing to add to this. Comedy gold.
The vast majority of features GH offers are of no use to me. In fact, in the age of vibe coding, zero-friction drive-by contributions are a net negative. The UX has been steadily dropping for years. The recent abysmal record in availability and bugs is just the last drop in the bucket.
The writing was on the wall the day they were acquired. They had a good run, but those days are long over.
Large platforms like GitHub have strong security teams and fast patching, but they also concentrate risk. A single vulnerability or abuse pattern can affect a huge portion of the ecosystem.
Decentralizing critical infrastructure doesn’t eliminate risk, but it distributes it.
What It Means for Open Source, Infrastructure and Security: https://tux.re/forum/viewtopic.php?t=183
And the search capabilities of alternative Forges are not the same (Mostly due to costs I assume)
The shape of the curve helps make it a little easier to understand why availability has been so abysmal.
Is it really this bad?
I've seen people complain about Github, but I thought it was more of a theoretical inconvenience rather than a real practical one. As in, the uptime for a serious software company should be 99.9, but two hours down just today, and constant outages over the month that they noticed... that seems way worse.
GitHub needs to slow down with the AI shit and spend manpower fixing what's broken. Actions is a complete fucking disaster.
Also I have no idea what Pierre is but their website is horrible.
Why do I want that running on somebody else's computer? It's bad enough that most developers already rely on Anthropic or OpenAI. What value does a remote working repo add?
That's not remotely true. I doubt most Copilot Business/Enterprise subscribers care about GitHub at all.
I looked up my own ID and GitHub join date from the API, all the way back in 2009: https://api.github.com/users/dueyfinster
what a cliff hanger!
As someone with similar warm feelings for GitHub, it's kind of sad to see the fragmentation but I have similar frustrations with the recent outages. Perhaps it's time to explore the idea of unbundling the social/discovery layer from the code hosting/dev tool so we can live between the myriad git/jj hosts but still do "social coding" together.
So in response to GitHub Issues, PRs, etc. being occasionally inaccessible each day, you're going to make them inaccessible for months?
Feels like a knee-jerk emotional decision, one that doesn't serve you, Ghostty, or the community.
At least have your backup ready to go
I’ve done it with bitbucket, how has their uptime been?
It's still around. It's just called Azure DevOps now. I personally think it's great for what it does.
The existing open web hosts are just super heavy. 512 MiB minimum RAM and stuff is totally unnecessary though I have hundreds of gigabytes of the stuff. And then you need all these DSL YAMLs around and a job runner etc. I think I could probably fit the whole thing into a much smaller size. And I have kube running already so job management isn't the hardest thing in the world. Nightmare for SOC2 perhaps. I guess we'll see.
I think this is all home-forgeable now. The advantage of Github for OP was the social aspect, clearly, but I don't use it for that. And I'm a really late user 7,322,596 from 2014!
I realize that everybody is different, but this still doesn't seem like the best of practices.
Because this is affecting the planet, our social ties, and everything else. And it's having impact on all of us indirectly
The other week I spent about an hour trying to figure out why my actions jobs were just stuck on waiting and not starting.
For my personal stuff, I think I'm going to migrate to either my own selfhosted instance of something like gitea or codeberg, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze anymore imo for GitHub, even with stuff like free runners and pages.
I personally think this is mainly attributed to GH Copilot and I would love to know if MS/GH even makes a profit on it.
(however the parallax scrolling of the background is gone, maybe when Microsoft arrived)
Are other people being impacted every day by github outages?
What does that look like?
I'm not saying the writer is wrong, I'm just wondering how folks who experience this every day work / how that exposure plays out / what it is.
i literally do not recall the last day that passed without someone on my team noticing that some portion of gh was degraded.
>i have stopped opening github, i just use github cli heavily, that's it, gh gives everything i need out of the box
on github actions run on github and agent pull them, checks the issues and fixes the code, the whole workflow changed
But it's very interesting to read about the author's very different perspective. User 1299 in 2008 is wild. His Github account could share the Radler I'm drinking right now with me.
I see that it's genuinely sad, but proprietary software and services make you completely dependent on someone else. If you want to rely on something for the future it has to be FOSS, everything else is a rug that will be pulled under your feet eventually.
I support Forgejo and Codeberg, but it's not clear that its architecture can scale to GitHub levels.
Microsoft subsidises a lot of OSS development. Who has equally big pockets?
I'm wondering to what extent the natural life cycle of SaaS products comes down to: the company grows, the old guard with good technical taste move on, bad technical decisions are made, quality declines, users move on.
What a timeline that would be. One can dream.
Question:
So, I'm also annoyed wit GitHub's stability (especially lately), but I'm curious: Ghostty has only a handful of PRs per day (excluding robot contribs); how is this a real problem? (and yes, I read your blog article).
Response:
1) The robot contribs don't auto-close if GH is down (cause it relies on GHA). We have retries but its pretty annoying.
(2) A PR isn't one and done. We need to comment, we need to run tests (~80 per run), and we do this multiple times per commit (due to review back and forth). So one PR has a lot of GH reliance right now.
(3) PRs tend to batch up, e.g. we don't do PR review constantly because all of us have other things to do, so we usually will try to review/merge multiple at one time. 3 PRs per day = 20 per week, which is a ton for volunteer time!
(4) We try to coordinate merge parties across maintainers in China+US+EU and if GH is down during our small time slice we just can't do any meaningful merging for 24 hours. We could alter our process here but that's just gaslighting.
(5) We get an order of magnitude more issue and discussion comments, which are affected by all of the above except CI. These are particularly affected by GHA/API outages.
(6) Dev work by maintainers happens in non-PR branches that run CI, and if CI is down we can't test our code (since Ghostty relies on a lot of testing we can't run locally, e.g. for platforms we don't have). It effectively pauses work on that branch.
(7) I've had multiple days in that 30-day window where Git operations themselves failed for different reasons. So I couldn't push a branch or whatever.
It just all adds up to be WAY too work impacting. The Ghostty maintainer channel is a stream of "oh GH is down again."
Lots of big services are like this. Google Colab's 'Connect to Drive' is down as we speak. I'm up right now because I know my Runpod VM in Kentucky is going to die rather abruptly and I'll need to manually get it up.
Everything has its flaws.
Microsoft lets you host your code, websites and media for free and
This hit me pretty hard. I hope GitHub finds its way sooner rather than later.
codeberg, self-hosted forgejo, gitlab, still-beta sourcehut, tangled? github was “the git community” and now it’s fracturing—you need accounts everywhere, you can’t easily discover neat projects
i like tangled if only because it’s built on atproto which emphasizes ownership and transferability of identity: something that would make the move off github so much easier
This PS is as impactful as the body of the post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
We all saw this coming when the Microsoft acquisition happened. They constitutionally can’t not fuck their products up.
Great footnote to finish the article.
I mean, why wouldn't you want to consolidate git repos, a heroku/fly.io/vercel like container system and direct access to web-based coding tools. They have the coding models and agents, slap a web interface over Claude Code running in a container, allow for commits and deploys. Control the entire stack.
Yet again, I wish the prevailing SCMS were more like Fossil, where issues and forum posts, at least, are part of the repository (and everything lives in a single sqlite file). (Of course Fossil actively opposes "pull requests", separate issue)
Not opposition, but very little incentive for the primary developers to implement the feature. Fossil's own developers happen to be the same as SQLite's developers, which doesn't accept outside contribution as a policy. It results in Fossil's features being predominantly, but not exclusively, the same features needed for SQLite and little else.
This thread discusses avenues for implementation: https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/ce238fccfd6b124d
There is a simple cost equation of 40-100x demand vs a fixed op-ex budget for the org. Github can either 40x their paying customer fees or try to monetize all of the free vibecoder (and open source) traffic.
So they will move their CI and issue tracker somewhere else.
And this will be largely a springboard for “people are leaving the ship huh” and misc. GitHub demise discussions.
Well, he is not alone with that. Something isn't working - and Microsoft either does not realise it, or does not care. I think the microslop strategy consumed Microsoft internally; it seems unable to change trajectory now. It's like you are driving to a cliff, in a car but you are not the main driver. It's quite interesting to see though - people can now expect "which disaster will hit Github tomorrow".
On the other hand, I also think it is time that Github gets some serious competition. Gitlab is not that competition; codeberg also not really (they'd need to up the useful features by a LOT and keep on driving that - I just don't see they have enough energy and momentum for that, but as a smaller source code hosting platform they are not bad either).
Over said decades I've worked on countless (open source) projects there.
Professionally? 1 project in all those years. Yes, exactly 1 (still there).
Every single other project was either in bitbucket, gitlab, gitea, forgejo or... I am sure I forgot some forge.
What I am trying to convey is: fascinating how "everything is on GitHub" is a very american way to see the world.
Yes, it seemed like Microsoft had a brief interregnum period of about 10 years where they seemed to have a renaissance and a genuine culture change and a concern for quality and initiative seemed to take hold.
And for many of us who came into the industry in the 90s this was a strange period because actually post-Gates/Balmer MS suddenly seem not so bad?
But that was until the first deals with OpenAI and the first round of layoffs. After Musk's purges at Twitter, MS was the first to really join in the fray.
Since then the old MS is back. Clearly as Machiavellian as in the past. But kind of sadder and more pathetic.
But honestly I'm also a bit confused by the framing some people have this thread because I remember GitHub always having reliability issues in its early days. It and Twitter were both famous RoR projects with notorious and constant outage issues in the 2008/2009 time-frame.
So bad that if a startup had made Microsoft Teams they would've gone out of business after a year.
But the substantial improvements!!!
People uploading more code doesn’t necessitate switching to Microsoft Azure backend, and doing other inane things that only benefit Microsoft.
It's targeted from the beginning to the masses.
It's used for non-technical people too; for documentation, dashboards, and bug tracking.
Viewing all this data is far easier in a GUI than a TUI.