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GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

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Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#11

A lot of words, but essentially says nothing useful. If GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world. Well, show me a hint of what the new world should look like? To me it seems like everyone is frustrated, mostly at how fast things are changing, but not necessary because the existing tools suddenly became trash/irrelevant. A lot of us are still contending with the fact that large amount of code is being produced and…

My personal take is that if you want to scale in engineering you really only have 2 options.

1) you start acting like a senior staff level engineer and you stop caring so much about implementation and start caring about the things that actually matter, the architecture, the performance profile, the scalability, the test coverage, the monitoring, the velocity of development, etc etc.

Or 2) you don't scale.

LLMs can write 10k lines of code per day like its nothing. You can't review that with a jade handled magnifying glass and keep all that in your mind. After a few months, you could easily have 250k lines of dense production code + much more in tests and tooling etc.

You either have a team of people to watch over that, or you don't. You're not scaling yourself to be able to review all that and keep it all in your mind.

If other people are scaling, and you're not, you're unlikely to do as well as them. BUT, it's not impossible if you're really good. Being really good scales way less than using LLMs effectively.

Google doesn't work because they rely on hope that every person they hire doesn't do things they shouldn't. It works because they make it nearly impossible to do things you shouldn't. You need to build systems as well. Or you don't. Just do it the old way.

Pick your poison.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#12

A lot of words, but essentially says nothing useful. If GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world. Well, show me a hint of what the new world should look like? To me it seems like everyone is frustrated, mostly at how fast things are changing, but not necessary because the existing tools suddenly became trash/irrelevant. A lot of us are still contending with the fact that large amount of code is being produced and…

>A lot of words, but essentially says nothing useful.

This is essentially the state of all blog posts now. As well as much code. Lots of content, not a lot of value.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#13
A lot of the choreography in standard GitHub workflows (make a branch and send a pull request and do the integration tests) is about teams with multiple devs working in multiple branches. If you just want to move fast with AI on a greenfield project then commit and push suffices

So the general basic primitives of git — diffs, commit history , content hash addressing are pretty optimal. If you wanted to implement version control in anything—even like a Notes app with undo—you’d eventually end up reinventing the same ideas

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#14

I don't feel like this article really answers the question of why this is the wrong shape. CI takes too long? What else? You can make your CI less intensive, that doesn't require a different Github. What features would a 'differently shaped' platform have?

I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github, but I almost can't believe how poor their support is for fine grained access tokens, org/individual credentials, etc. are in the same era as Copilot/VSCode/AI devtools and vibe coding, as they drown in a rapidly growing volume of agent-driven usage.

It's going to keep growing way past how it is now. I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines, and use github as a kind of send-off point or starting point literally every single time. In a couple months I hope to be doing that with 10-20 and if it were cheaper I'd go even further, because why not? But even now I'm spending $0.25-$5 every single time I send out an agent to do a sizable thing and obviously they are positioned to capture some of that, because nobody else just lets me pay them $5/mo for git and basic hosting that Just Works (when it's up) and gets out of my way.

So why do they not want me or anybody else to pay them to create delegated/short-lived identities, or at least make their auth token story better so that if there is a way to set that up properly, people use that instead of sending commits "Co-written by Claude Opus 5" (literally every single commit by Claude is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to provide a real identity/auth solution for coding agents)?

Why is there no Mythos-like code review specialist model that for non-F100 companies to get defensive cybersecurity reviews? Or why not even just a cheap and good / smart and fast specialist to review my agents' or my own work for problems. Have they not even talked about doing that? I'm not going to pay some chatgpt wrapper company run by 24 year olds to do that, I want to pay the company that I already pay for that kind of stuff, that has the most data of anybody in the world to do it.

Why can't I gig out work on github either? Do you know how many developers there are on the periphery that want that kind of work and spend their time on reddit/discord/github trying to break into the industry? If I could chuck $5 at some task for a guy in another country trying to break into software to do, without all the overhead and sketchiness it involves now, why wouldn't I do that? That's literally the same thing that people do with LLMs.

Why does github codespaces not have some SKU/version for colleges to offer students as learning environments or companies interviewing developers to use for dev environments? My company tried working on this btw, and the only real barrier to entry is how much you need to trust a company to give them all your developers' credentials by virtue of having root on the computers their credentials and IP come from. It would be 1000x easier to sell this to non-enterprises if your name was Microsoft, and everyone was already your customer and trusting you with identity/ip anyway.

Github actions are not interesting to me because I can just ask my computer to create a cloud vm and test stuff in there, and it does, and I don't have to configure YAML or learn some specific way to do it. That's like the opposite kind of product github should focus on, it's almost a market for lemons because if your usage is enough for the profit to matter to Microsoft you can just pay a guy to migrate you to any other compute provider. Github has unique/best-in-the-world assets and opportunities for products and services with way better margins/growth because of how deeply the global software and developer community depends on them.

Let me pay $1/mo/delegate identity and $100/mo on bounties and $10/pop on interview hosting and $0.10/hr for agent sandboxes. It would be so much easier for Microsoft/Github to create and win these markets than anybody else and it's where the growth is

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#16

I don't feel like this article really answers the question of why this is the wrong shape. CI takes too long? What else? You can make your CI less intensive, that doesn't require a different Github. What features would a 'differently shaped' platform have?

I'm not going to pretend I know how to do Github better than Github, but I almost can't believe how poor their support is for fine grained access tokens, org/individual credentials, etc. are in the same era as Copilot/VSCode/AI devtools and vibe coding, as they drown in a rapidly growing volume of agent-driven usage. It's going to keep growing way past how it is now. I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cl…

I am genuinely curious:

> I often drive 4-8 agents at a time, many in the cloud or on different machines,

To do what? How many hours a day do they run? I find it hard to come up with use cases for agents to be doing so much work constantly, but that might just be me.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#17

Software engineering hasn't changed. Every aspect of it is the same as 4 years ago. A code monkey churns out poorly designed code and poorly deploys it. Nobody really pays attention and it kinda looks like it works - until it doesn't. The only difference now is the code monkey's name is Claude and everyone can hire him. But every part of the SDLC, every component, every way it's used, are all identical. Same differen…

> The job of a house framer didn't change, it just got faster and slightly easier.

And also quicker/easier to screw up in subtle and insidious ways!

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#18
post #5

"I think of GitHub as a collaboration tool." Well yes but git itself is the tool at the base of the pyramid you call GitHub and co. It seems you actively want git to look like all the other things you are used to and they are all walled gardens. GitHub takes git and basically turns it back into subversion and co. Instead of all that anarchic "no repo is king" long haired hippie nonsense, you want central control 8) I…

Yea, I keep saying: "Git doesn't need a hub."

One of the greatest features of git is that it is not reliant on a centralized repo! Why graft centralization onto a tool that doesn't want it?

The non-git features of GitHub, like actions and CI and the issue tracker and all that stuff are fine, but I'd argue don't really belong as part of your source control system. If you need that stuff, you should be able to pick and choose the tools you want to use, rather than just live with whatever GH gives you. But they really have nothing to do with git.

Re: GitHub is the wrong shape for this new world

#19
> These aren't features of a developer tool. They're infrastructure primitives. Just as we stopped thinking about provisioning individual servers and started thinking about compute, storage, and networking as composable building blocks, software delivery needs the same shift.

They already are. you don't have to use github, or all it's features, git is the protocol, CI/CD are the added on composable blocks. Most platforms offer crypo signature verification, there's also opensource options.

Basicaly wtf are you on about? that's 5mins I'm not getting back.

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