Everyone wants to pin this on the Microsoft acquisition or incompetence but it seems pretty clear to me from the material
GitHub has posted that AI has 10xed the amount of code being committed to GH, which has downstream effects everywhere - CI, Actions, code ingestion, everywhere. The author pins it on weird things like MS Copilot, which kind of feels like he’s listing off things he doesn’t like rather than casual favors. This is ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
Yeah, I had the exact same response after reading the post. I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. Let's say the _perfect_ GitHub replacement spawns tomorrow? What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
> I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
of all the awful things AI is doing and will be doing to society, killing centralized code hosting and social media will be its shinniest moments, both deserve to die painful deaths
Why is centralized code hosting getting killed? I'm running an opensource project, >99% of the code is AI generated, could not do this without GitHub. Ai generated source code needs a place where AIs and people can collaborate. I'm expecting GitHub to hugely successful, but mostly for an AI audience.
3 months post Microsoft acquisition, GitHub expanded the free plan to include unlimited private repos.
The next year they removed the limitation on collaborators on private repos for free users.
In the last 4 years they’ve significantly improved their project management tools. I think a lot of teams can make do with GitHub Projects, they’re pretty decent.
Who knows if any of these are directly because of Microsoft or not. But there has naturally been material improvements to GitHub in the years after being bought by Microsoft.
I'm loving it, running an opensource project mostly AI generated, i don't have to think about version control, building and testing my app, running AI code review, hosting my docs website, API and cli to enable Claude Code to interact with everything, etc.
It provides huge value for anyone running an opensource AI generated project.
“GitLab - enterprise grade, meaning it’s bloated and confusing but it’ll impress your boss. This could be the choice if you need multiple meetings to make the choice.“
Github is merely a symptom. Open source, and possibly the bulk of the broader WWW is at risk.
I've been working on collaborative daily games, and two years ago I was excited at the possibility of releasing them for public consumption, open source, at my own cost, and with no intention of compensation.
Instead I've spent two years playing these games online with only in-person friends, and now see nothing but negatives when I consider opening them to a wider audience.
It sort of feels like no major open source repository can be possibly left well enough alone. I remember how SourceForge went down the drain, it's a real pity to see same happen with GH.
Side note: I read the URL as "dBus hell". We've all been there m8
I went to look at a repo on Github today. Clicked on the "xxx commits" link to see the commit history, and got told I've hit a secondary rate limit and need to wait.
I'm the only person on this network that would even look at Github, and my connection has a dedicated IP, no CGN.
So, what's the actual real alternative ? The one that also supports open source projects ? Ironically gitlab is costlier than github, and not without their faults, but that's "maybe" the only other alternative here, anything else ?
Agree with Gitlab as an enterprise alternative. Beautifully boring and safe to have complex teams and permissions. Also has a good enough Terraform support, and a nice workflow to host docker images
I installed forgejo on my home server and never looked back. The only problem I face is when hosting an app on DigitalOcean App platform, or vercel etc. They only connect to GitHub.
I have lost count of how many times something went down on GitHub ever since documenting it on this comment chain [0] and also predicting 6 years ago [1], that going all in and centralizing everything on to GitHub was really not a good idea if you need stability or to push a critical fix and your GitHub actions doesn't work.
Now, are you going to finally self host or should we continue to expect another outage on GitHub?
This time, there is no CEO of GitHub to help us. It is Copilot, and Tay.ai that are still struggling to maintain GitHub.
Everyone wants to pin this on the Microsoft acquisition or incompetence but it seems pretty clear to me from the material GitHub has posted that AI has 10xed the amount of code being committed to GH, which has downstream effects everywhere - CI, Actions, code ingestion, everywhere. The author pins it on weird things like MS Copilot, which kind of feels like he’s listing off things he doesn’t like rather than casual favors. This is ignoring the 800 pound gorilla in the room.
Yeah, I had the exact same response after reading the post. I mean, I'm all for jumping on the Microsoft hate train, but not if it misses the elephant in the room. Let's say the _perfect_ GitHub replacement spawns tomorrow? What's preventing the same infrastructure challenges of millions of lines of AI-generated code destroying it?
I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
> I think centralized code hosting is pretty much going to get killed by AI. Just like it's doing to social media.
Private corporate codebases are a poor fit for GH because they don't benefit from public social graph effects. And the typical codebase isn't so large as to be technically challenging to deal with with OSS tools. I'd guess they make up a substantial share of revenue.
But once the reliability is called into question, self-hosted or smaller alternatives start to look good. Although there's some trickiness there if you want to be super cautious about making sure you can get to your code+infra in case of a vendor incident, especially if you're cloud based.
Saas code hosting seems to be the problem here. If companies self hosted, they could deal with the scaling problems themselves.
of all the awful things AI is doing and will be doing to society, killing centralized code hosting and social media will be its shinniest moments, both deserve to die painful deaths
Yes, the terrible sin of ... Hosting code where people can find it
Why is centralized code hosting getting killed? I'm running an opensource project, >99% of the code is AI generated, could not do this without GitHub. Ai generated source code needs a place where AIs and people can collaborate. I'm expecting GitHub to hugely successful, but mostly for an AI audience.
Because it's centralized. Your project pays the price for every unrelated project that's getting overloaded.
GitHub hasn't changed in any positive way since the acquisition. A decade is a long time, it tells.
GitHub action, co pilot. Oh and that ugly AI search I'm unable to disable. Migration to azure.
Yes Microsoft managed to ruin the network effect. Outages? The straw that broke the camel's back.
3 months post Microsoft acquisition, GitHub expanded the free plan to include unlimited private repos.
The next year they removed the limitation on collaborators on private repos for free users.
In the last 4 years they’ve significantly improved their project management tools. I think a lot of teams can make do with GitHub Projects, they’re pretty decent.
Who knows if any of these are directly because of Microsoft or not. But there has naturally been material improvements to GitHub in the years after being bought by Microsoft.
I'm loving it, running an opensource project mostly AI generated, i don't have to think about version control, building and testing my app, running AI code review, hosting my docs website, API and cli to enable Claude Code to interact with everything, etc.
It provides huge value for anyone running an opensource AI generated project.
How on earth is Actions a downside?
I think they meant all the security holes that have been popping up and that there is no interest from Microsoft to fix them.
[delayed]
Github had lots of outages even before AI was introduced.
“GitLab - enterprise grade, meaning it’s bloated and confusing but it’ll impress your boss. This could be the choice if you need multiple meetings to make the choice.“
lol!
Github is merely a symptom. Open source, and possibly the bulk of the broader WWW is at risk.
I've been working on collaborative daily games, and two years ago I was excited at the possibility of releasing them for public consumption, open source, at my own cost, and with no intention of compensation.
Instead I've spent two years playing these games online with only in-person friends, and now see nothing but negatives when I consider opening them to a wider audience.
It sort of feels like no major open source repository can be possibly left well enough alone. I remember how SourceForge went down the drain, it's a real pity to see same happen with GH.
Side note: I read the URL as "dBus hell". We've all been there m8
No m80 it's a nushell based on decibel units dBu Shell
I went to look at a repo on Github today. Clicked on the "xxx commits" link to see the commit history, and got told I've hit a secondary rate limit and need to wait.
I'm the only person on this network that would even look at Github, and my connection has a dedicated IP, no CGN.
The only real way to browse the site is to be logged in.
Exactly the same here. I get that regularly.
Yeah this is just typical techbro gaslighting. There is no rate-limit and hasn't been for years, but they refuse to change the wording to reflect.
Would you care to cite your source that GitHub does not apply rate limits to unauthenticated requests?
I'm not sure what to make of the graph.
On the one hand the acquisition of GitHub may have caused the availability to be worse.
On the other hand, the 100.00% availability before the acquisition looks suspicious, wondering if it's not just the status page being better updated.
(I'm aware of the recent availability problems with GitHub, but on the graph the problems start in 2020 and don't seem to worsen significantly)
So, what's the actual real alternative ? The one that also supports open source projects ? Ironically gitlab is costlier than github, and not without their faults, but that's "maybe" the only other alternative here, anything else ?
Codeberg, Sourcehut, or self hosted Gitea.
I just installed a gitea. It seems decent.
I wasn't expecting to see the outages being nearly the same even before the 2023 ai inflection point
Agree with Gitlab as an enterprise alternative. Beautifully boring and safe to have complex teams and permissions. Also has a good enough Terraform support, and a nice workflow to host docker images
I installed forgejo on my home server and never looked back. The only problem I face is when hosting an app on DigitalOcean App platform, or vercel etc. They only connect to GitHub.
I’m in a similar boat, I abandoned ship for Gitea years ago (prior to forgejo fork) and have no regrets.
For things that require GitHub I’ve been able to mirror repos there and get things working. Keeping code in sync is annoying though.
I have lost count of how many times something went down on GitHub ever since documenting it on this comment chain [0] and also predicting 6 years ago [1], that going all in and centralizing everything on to GitHub was really not a good idea if you need stability or to push a critical fix and your GitHub actions doesn't work.
Now, are you going to finally self host or should we continue to expect another outage on GitHub?
This time, there is no CEO of GitHub to help us. It is Copilot, and Tay.ai that are still struggling to maintain GitHub.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37395238
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
Why do I keep seeing people blaming Tay.ai? That was a one-off Twitter chatbot that was shut down a decade ago.