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Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

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121–130 of 280 posts

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#122
post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

GitHub’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.

When you're the uncontested market leader, you don't budget operations to be perfectly reliable, you budget to not be too unreliable. All those 9's are expensive after all.

The AI boom caught them napping though, and they're slipping well into the too unreliable category

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#124
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the fact that its written in Ruby on Rails probably doesn’t make it easier, performance wise.

Honestly. They’re already performing miracles with RoR. How many non Ruby apps and all the databases and systems behind could climb their traffic 14x when they probably only perf-tested for a sustained 2-3x and, and paid for a profitable amount of rack space rather than a “lol, VC money, we’ll 10x later” amount of infra.

Systems engineers generally don't run performance tests at 2x or any specific scale.

You load test and see how much it takes until the system falls over - basically you DDoS yourself and see what the numbers were when things broke, and what broke first second so on. Maybe in a sandbox maybe against prod.

It's very telling that issues began almost to the day of the Microsoft acquisition.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#125
post #74
post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

I would take what C-level execs say with a grain of salt. Remember these folks hire people with plenty of system design experience. They likely also have the money for hardware resources. If load was an issue these things would have been solved already. Or they are purposely causing millions of dollars of productivity loss daily by not solving this. Something more serious is at play. And I want to hear from the actua…

I think owning GitHub is a prestige play, not necessarily thought of as a profit center.

Now however, it's competing for resources directly with the corporations core strategic plans.

GitHub having issues is embarrassing, but the shareholders don't really care.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#126
post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

I want to believe that it's justification, but looking at the historical uptime [0] (early data is actually overly positive on this graph since it had to scrape historical data instead of realtime), I can't be convinced of this anymore. They do have more load - that's for sure. I just don't believe it's an excuse for their god awful uptime.

[0] https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#127
post #77

If you are doing 1000 commits a day, whats the point of git? Does the AI ever look back at the shit trail it left behind? Diffs are no longer diffs, they look like largescale delete and rewrite

AI definitely does look at git commit history in my experience

It certainly looks at the commit history more than I ever have. I find it quite cool when it points out interesting hints from the history.

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#129
post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

GitHub’s reliability issues started earlier than the boom in agentic coding they talk about. I have comments on here from 2025 talking about massive outages with actions and issues.

GitHub uptime is cyclical. It's bad because they won't focus on the core, and then the right users complain and GitHub focuses on core again before it repeats. This is just the latest round exacerbated by vibe coding

Re: Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?

#130
post #8

Github is struggling because AI-boosted coding increased the number of commits 14x in the past year, and the pace is still accelerating. The site is struggling to keep up. Github's COO confirms it here: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878 Platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. As of three months ago, it was 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth rema…

Github is owned by Microsoft, its not like its some boostrapped startup who has a closet of servers that are melting.

And on top of that, Microsoft is one of the companies that created this problem in the first place.
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